Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Imperial College London’s expertise in innovation management, technology transfer and engineering has been made available to a cross-industry community of elite multinational companies through the Microsoft-hosted Innovation Outreach Programme (IOP).

The IOP aims to help these firms maintain their competitive edge by helping them to develop and test innovative business ideas and services, or to improve existing ones.

Imperial College Business School will provide the business-focused research, working with other Imperial departments to draw together engineering expertise for technical proof-of-concept and new technology development. Members of the IOP will also be able to work with Imperial Innovations, the College’s technology transfer company, to test and launch successful ventures.

Developing and commercialising an innovation requires the coordination and integration of knowledge from many different sources.

Seeking to advance both theory and practice on how organisations create, distribute and capture value from knowledge generated through the innovation process, the Knowledge for Innovation group, led by Dr Ammon Salter of Imperial College Business School, identifies tools, methods and approaches to enable firms to be more effective at creating and capturing value from what they know.

Adversity for the UK economy could be an opportunity to become to a world leader in innovation, through the commercialisation of the academic research of the country’s best universities, said Dr Graham Spittle, Chairman of the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board, speaking at the Imperial College Business School-sponsored Innovation Summit held at the Royal Society in December 2009,

Imperial Innovations, the College’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) -listed technology transfer company, has already shown itself to be highly successful at commercialising Imperial College London’s academic research. It has over 80 spin-out companies in its
portfolio and its share price rose by 24% during 2008–09.

Building a sustainable future for a world with nine billion inhabitants will require unprecedented cooperation between business, academia and policy makers. But while the scale of the task is almost incomprehensibly enormous, the challenges also create opportunities, argues Professor Gerard George, Director of the Rajiv Gandhi Centre and Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Imperial College Business School.

Read about the recent Innovation for Inclusive Growth conference, with keynote speaker Professor John Beddington CMG, FRS, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government and Honorary Principal Research Fellow in Imperial’s Faculty of Natural Sciences. The one-day conference was hosted by the Business School and the Advanced Institute of Management Research at Imperial in April 2010.

Consumer debt has increased dramatically in recent years leading to calls for better controls on how retail risk is measured and managed. The recent introduction of tighter regulations has required  financial institutions to adopt sophisticated risk assessment models.

The Mathematics in Banking and Finance programme of Imperial’s Institute for Mathematical Science specialises in research in the consumer financial services sector, and in the development of statistical, data mining, and machine learning techniques applied in this area, in particular.

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins and Imperial scientists in the Grantham Institute for Climate Change are working on

• understanding what greenhouse gas emissions are doing to the climate and to life on this planet
• how we can reduce these emissions
• how we can reduce the impact of the climate changes
• understanding the financial impacts of extreme climate events

See recent news on climate change research at Imperial.

Imperial harnesses some of the greatest minds in the country to ponder this question.

• David Miles, a visiting professor in Imperial College Business School is a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, which is responsible for setting the Bank of England interest rate, amongst other things.

• We host events such as the recent Innovation Summit, where leading financial experts spoke about the challenges faced by the economy.

• The Business School runs courses in finance for postgraduates, including an MSc in Finance, as well as a recently created MSc in Risk Management and Financial Engineering.