Knowinnovation has been involved with the design and facilitation of academic innovation workshops for the last eight years, which has given us a tremendous opportunity to refine how we can help government agencies, funding bodies, universities and other organisations accelerate scientific (and other) innovation.

Our star programme is the Sandpit, a.k.a. the Ideas Lab, a 5-day residential programme that pulls together a multi-disciplinary group of participants with the objective of generating radical and risky research ideas. We’ve also designed a mini-Sandpit event, called the Jumpstart, which allows Universities to launch into multi-disciplinary innovation even if they don’t have the time or resources to organise a full-on Sandpit. We’re extremely keen on virtual innovation, and we’ve started to do more blended events that combine the efforts of participants on-site and on-line.

We also do some training: a CPS process training and facilitation skill building in our Catalyst programme, and an on-line self-study program called The Creative Thinking Course.

A large part of our work is for organisations that fund scientific innovation; we’ve worked for a number of UK Research Councils (EPSRC, ESRC, NERC and the STFC), the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and FRENZ, a cooperative effort of the New Zealand Ministry of Science and Innovation (MSI) and the European Commission (EC). We’ve also facilitated programmes for a number of universities in the UK and the US, for non-profits and NGOs; for example we’ve done a lot of training for IFAD and we’re partnering with Fintrac on a very exciting USAID-funded project: Partnering for Innovation. And last but not least, we’ve run events for a few corporate clients along the way, including P&G.