01 December 2009
Partners who deliver (Engineering and Technology)

Edinburgh-based Interface - another such body - acts as a central point of access to Scotland's research base to manufacturing companies on both sides of the border. Facing a technical issue with product shelf-life, for example, Edinburgh-based Nairn's Oatcakes turned to Interface when it realised that solving the problem lay outside its own expertise and abilities.

Interface introduced the company to a number of institutions, explains technical director Gavin Love, prompting a tie-in with the Scottish Crop Research Institute. As at Kawasaki, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership turned out to be the best solution, with an associate from the Institute working full-time at Nairn's, but able to call upon the Institute's full breadth of expertise, as well as its laboratory and testing equipment.

"The main reason companies come to us is because they've not previously worked with a university, and have no knowledge as to how to go about it," says Interface director Dr Siobhan Jordan. "They say: ‘We don't know what we don't know', and a kind of paralysis sets in, where it becomes easier to do nothing."

Courtesty of IET magazine see website http://kn.theiet.org/magazine/