Our Pounds 11 million top-up

Universities are so broke that the Government is risking all to push through top-up fees. But Dr Ed Tinley, head of business development at London South Bank University, helped win his college millions. He tells us how it works

ONE day Londoners may find themselves travelling comfortably on the Tube in a heatwave - and it could all be thanks to London South Bank University.

Funded by London Underground, we are doing research into cooling the Tube by pumping in air cooled by the natural water table.

This is just one example of how London South Bank University is using its expertise to benefit the city's economy and businesses.

The price per student that the Government gives universities has steadily fallen. Universities have to find money from somewhere, so bringing it in from business is perfectly legitimate.

Last year, we brought in Pounds 7 million from research, ranging from food and nutrition through to new materials for mobile phones, from advanced computer software to business marketing concepts and from social science to nursing; Pounds 500,000 came from consultancy and Pounds 1.3 million from knowledge transfer activities - transferring ideas and skills from universities into business.

Training courses for external customers brought in a further Pounds 2 million.

There's also commercialisation of ideas from research but the financial return is notoriously difficult to quantify. We invest in these projects and hope to get a return, but there's no guarantee. We do all this to bring in additional funds for the university, but, of course, it also benefits business and the London economy.

We reinvest the money we bring in on equipment, pay for academics to attend conferences, to fund research and to offer studentships.

It provides a flexible source of income that allows the university to reinvest in areas we want to develop.

The money tends to go back into the area that generated it. We also have to pay for my office - I've got eight people working in the business development area.

A key role of my office is to make the university more accessible, attractive and responsive to business needs.

Recently, we had a student come to us who had spent time working for a major motor company. He wanted to do a course in engineering design so he could take an idea he had while at the motor company and develop it into his own business.

He successfully completed his degree here and - supported by the university - has set up his own business, DSine Technology, which is developing "intelligent" wing mirrors which eliminate blindspot problems when articulated lorries are reversing.

We have also helped one of our professors and his team to set up a new company, Biox Systems, to commercially develop its radical new probe for measuring rates of moisture evaporation at the skin's surface. My office worked closely with the academic inventor to set up a new business to exploit the invention.

With funding from the university and an external support agency, Biox Systems is now attracting considerable interest from and making sales to the pharmaceutical and cosmetics field.

I am a chemist by training and have spent various periods of time performing and managing research in industry, with Boots, Rolls- Royce and BP, as well as in several universities. I joined South Bank in 1992 as a technology transfer adviser.

Uniquely for a London university, most of our 1,700 staff and 17,000 studentsare based on a single site at the Elephant and Castle. London South Bank University is in the Southwark and Lambeth catchment area, two of the poorest boroughs in London.

My job in the beginning was to trawl around the university to find technology that might be of interest to businesses.

At that time the idea of transferring technologies out of universities into business was beginning to be recognised in many universities as an opportunity for generating additional income. It was, however, still a bit of a sideline and the poor relation to traditional university activities of teaching and research.

But the business role has been growing for some years and in the past four years has mushroomed. Places like Oxford and Cambridge attract much higher levels of research and business income than us because they have such a well-established infrastructure and reputation.

There was a real need for resources to be made available to universities to enable them to develop and build this area of their activities. To the present government's credit, it has done just this. Through the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) all universitiesnow have access to significant-funding designed to strengthen their links with business and their community.

HEIF has allowed my office to employ a number of professional people who have worked in business, who therefore appreciate the way business works and have experience of its problems.

I have always seen this as a crucial requirement if we are to convince businesses that we are serious about working with them and capable of providing a professional service.

From the business development angle, our academic staff are the university's most important assets. They possess the skills, expertise and ideas that my office seeks to promote to businesses.

However, academics have many demands on their time, so businesses can be frustrated when they cannot get hold of the academics doing work for them. My office provides the conduit between the two. Businesses will phone us up saying what they want and we find the appropriate academic and respond to the business quickly.

All universities offer a similar range of services to businesses. In that sense, we are competitors.

In the past couple of years we've set up a number of business units within the university, such as our London Food Centre.

also managing director of SBU Enterprises Limited, the university's wholly-owned trading company. The university is a charity whose main purpose is teaching and research. Some of our activities, such as consultancy work for business and licensing of the ideas stemming from our staff 's research, are deemed to be trading activities.

To protect charitable status, we - like most universities - channel these trading activities through our trading company. Any profits made by our commercial arm are returned to the university under the Gift Aid arrangements.

My job is interesting, challenging and rewarding. Of course, it has its frustrations, but the best part of my job is the satisfaction of helping the academics successfully raise funds to research and transfer their ideas and skills into the marketplace. It makes commuting into London every day just about bearable.

London South Bank University (020 7928 8989; www.lsbu.ac.uk/ business).

(c)2004. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.