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Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

Use our expertise, technology and skills to embed new knowledge into your organisation.

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What is a Knowledge Transfer Partnership?

If your business has a core strategic need or an innovative idea but is lacking in expertise and technology to make it happen, then a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) is an excellent vehicle for bringing it to life.

KTPs have been helping businesses to improve their productivity and grow for over 40 years. They provide funding support to help businesses collaborate with universities, and a framework to ensure that new knowledge and technology gained from the project is embedded into the organisation.

My expectations were that we would have a productive new engineer with strong theoretical knowledge, coupled with good interpersonal skills. We got that with bells on. The relationships developed with the academic team, whose knowledge and enthusiasm shone, will no doubt continue to bear fruit for both parties. We are already well into planning more KTP activity.

Neil Pomeroy, Technical Director, Cole-Parmer Ltd

NTU as your KTP partner

We have a long history of delivering successful KTP projects to businesses and helping them to innovate and grow, and in 2020, two of our KTPs were acknowledged for their excellence by Innovate UK.

How it works

Student using laptop in NTU library

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) enable businesses to bring in new skills and expertise to a project on a fixed-term basis. They are part-funded by Innovate UK, to improve business performance.

A KTP involves three partners:

  • your business (providing it has a UK base)
  • Nottingham Trent University
  • a graduate (Associate)

The graduate works within your organisation, but has the support of an NTU academic with expertise and experience in the field of your project.
Projects last 12-36 months.

We will help you to:

  • apply for funding
  • manage programme administration
  • source and recruit the right graduate.

Throughout the project, an NTU academic will supervise the graduate and provide guidance and expertise in partnership with your business.

Benefits of a KTP project

Starting a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project can:

  • provide expertise that you don’t have in-house to embed into your organisation
  • help you access new markets
  • make you more competitive and productive
  • be cost-effective due to grant funding.
  • lead to significant increase in profitability for business partners as a direct result of the partnership. The average increase in pre-tax profit for three years following completion of a KTP project is £600,000 per annum.

Management KTPs

People in a meeting

Expand management capability and transform your performance.

Innovate UK has introduced a new programme designed to inject significant management expertise that expands business capability, increases efficiency and enables lasting change and growth.

The initiative is called a Management Knowledge Transfer Partnership (MKTP), and it runs alongside the highly successful Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme which has been helping companies innovate for growth for over 45 years.

MKTPs deliver key, strategic management-based projects to increase business effectiveness via partnerships with the UK’s outstanding Business Schools and Social Science departments.

MKTP key benefits

  • Increase management capability.
  • Up-skill staff and improve productivity.
  • Access to Innovate UK funding.
  • Access high-calibre graduates.

What are Management KTPs?

Just like our highly effective KTP programme, Management KTPs (MKTPs) create a dynamic 3-way partnership between your company, a team of academic experts and a skilled graduate. The focus of a MKTP is specifically on driving effectiveness through better management practices.

MKTPs aim to deliver transformational productivity improvement, identifying key, strategic management-based projects to increase business effectiveness. How? Via novel and innovative partnerships with the UK’s world class Business Schools.

Who could benefit from an MKTP?

  • Growth-oriented SMEs, and larger organisations up to 500 employees, eager to build and execute their ambitious management strategy by introducing better management practices.
  • Businesses seeking significant productivity gains, recognising that good management and leadership can help deliver this.
  • Organisations looking to up-skill their people and make step-change improvements in productivity by deploying industry-leading practices and innovation processes.

Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021

In the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, 86% of NTU’s research impact was assessed to be either world-leading or internationally excellent. The overall quality of each Unit of Assessment NTU submitted to REF in 2021 also saw an improvement from the previous REF in 2014

Contact our team to talk about KTP projects by speaking to Sadaf Hussein at sadaf.hussein@ntu.ac.uk on 0115 848 8173; or Joshua Woods at joshua.woods@ntu.ac.uk on 0115 848 4544