Supporting process re-design for a university impact service

Sector – Higher education 

Client – Queen Mary University of London 

The challenge – How can a university process better support academics to achieve impact through their research?

Activity – We are supporting a team at QMUL to substantially re-design a process to increase the quality and diversity of academic applications to funding to lead to impacts for academic research. This has included carrying out research (interviews, a survey and benchmarking with other universities), stakeholder engagement and cross-university dialogue. The outputs include a collective problem definition, identification of opportunities, prioritised solutions and design principles.

The overall outcome was a shift from designing a process towards designing a service that co-created value for academics, professional services staff and their external partners and wider beneficiaries.

Rather than delivering design consultancy, in this project we supported the QMUL team to develop their own skills and understanding of the potential for a design approach.