Activating research and innovation across education and industry is crucial. London Metropolitan University launched a challenge to enhance the inclusivity at Arsenal FC match days.
London Metropolitan University (LMU) is on a strategic change journey encapsulated in the institution’s Strategy 2019-2025, which seeks to combine academic achievement with financial stability. This need to diversify research income and enhance impact through working with industry is key to delivering these strategic aims.
Supporting academic staff in contributing to these goals required a different approach to both kickstarting research and engaging with external organisations. To pump prime this pilot, LMU attracted Arsenal FC to put forward an inclusivity challenge and, with SimplyDo’s proven process, encouraged academics to collaborate with other partners across industry to provide solutions.
We worked closely with both London Metropolitan University and Arsenal FC to understand their needs and future goals. Using our proven challenge hack process, we explored numerous organisational challenges with Arsenal, narrowing down to inclusivity covering both fans and staff at match days and co-created a challenge and supporting process to ensure academic engagement.
Together, we utilised SimplyDo platform’s announcements, likes, and comments functionality to help not only capture innovative research ideas, but shape and evolve the research proposals in a safe and supportive digital environment.
Bringing academia and industry together was supported through the platform by our AI-driven partner identification tool, Innovation Intelligence. This allowed us to source several third and private-sector organisations that could collaborate on the funded research.
This new approach to supporting academics with research led to a fantastic response with over 2000 views of the challenge page and 145 comments to support the research proposals. This resulted in 26 innovative new research proposals being submitted.
The proposals were shortlisted by key stakeholders across the university and football club. Six teams were invited to pitch at the Emirates Stadium to cement the relationship between the two organisations and invite new third-sector and commercial partners into the process.
Three projects were selected for funding, with Arsenal FC supporting the challenges with access to facilities and internal staff time. These projects are the beginning of the research and innovation journey, which will lead to future collaboration between these partners.
