Engage HEI conference 2012
'The Impact of Engaging'

Lancaster University Management School
in partnership with The Work Foundation

Westminster, London, 9th and 10th January, 2012

Building on the successful Engage HEI conferences in 2007 (Lancaster), in 2009 (Birmingham City) and 2010 (Bradford) the purpose of this conference is to explore how we, as academics and practitioners, understand knowledge exchange activities with businesses,  frame our work theoretically and practically and incorporate learning in order to improve engagement and to inform policy on the real impact of these kind of activities.

David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, states:

"It is vital for our future economic growth that business and universities work closely together. That is why we are maintaining Higher Education Innovation Funding over the spending review period, providing further incentives for universities to work better with business. It is a vote of confidence in our higher education institutions and a major investment in growth."

As the country is undergoing the recession, many new ways of dealing with its hardships are being explored and exploited. HEIs have been involved in this process through supporting business development and providing expertise on local, regional, national, European and international levels. A lot has been achieved and it has never been more vital to understand the impacts of this work. Join others at Engage HEI 2012 Conference to share the perspectives in the field, form important relationships and inform change.

The Engage HEI 2012 conference is an open environment for businesses, HEIs and policy makers for exploring the role of higher education in fostering business growth and economic activity. Conference themes include (but not limited to):

1. Understanding the nature and distribution of impact; models of knowledge exchange and engagement.
2. Areas of impact: macro (on regional or national growth or international engagement) and micro (on innovation, on HR, on performance, impact and organization’s absorptive capacity)
3. Quantitative and qualitative approaches to measuring impact
4. The relationship between the impact and policy making
5. The role of collaboration in increasing impact

We invite you to submit an extended abstract and share your research, thinking and findings; we welcome Academic research papers (either refereed or working), practitioner papers and case studies for presentation at the conference.

Purpose and Aims

We suggest that studies in the above mentioned areas will not only help to account for the knowledge exchange and the bridging activities between the HEIs, the businesses and the policy makers, but also direct the future efforts, identify the gap areas and inform the future policy guidelines. The two-day conferences, on 9th and 10th of January, 2012, aims to provide a space for presentations, round table discussions and information socialization to share ideas, approaches and stories from regional, national, European and international outreach activities.

Publication of papers

Conference proceedings will include the extended abstracts. We are pursuing a special issue journal for presenters who wish to develop their papers further in a peer reviewed publication process.