Jaguar Land Rover, the IKT, and IXC host successful Innovation Experience
03 December 2013
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), The Institute of Knowledge Transfer (IKT) and innovation specialists the InnovationXchange (IXC) collaborated on 28th November to provide a stimulating and successful innovation experience for academia. As a new venture between the three organisations, academics from across the UK were given the opportunity to visit JLR on Thursday 28th November.
Tony Harper, JLR's Head of Research, gave an excellent presentation for the audience that not only set out key priorities for the automotive industry and JLR in particular, but also illustrated the scale and complexity of the innovation task. He demonstrated the multitude of different players that need to be involved at different time points along the research and development pipeline in developing both components within the cars and the whole product. In doing so he also described the different business models that are used according to what is required and the way management is structured to help set up and manage the complex multi-party collaborations that are necessary to aim for success.
His presentation concluded with details about the new National Automotive Innovation Campus, the building of which will start on the Warwick campus next year. This will house 500 JLR staff alongside a community of staffs from many different organisations including universities, government agencies (such as the Technology Strategy Board, TSB), SME’s and large corporates with whom JLR will be collaborating to pursue new product R and D.
A probing question and answer session was followed by a tour of the manufacturing facilities at Solihull. This was an experience that brought to life the scale and complexity involved in high value manufacturing today and the substantial capital investment required.
Feedback from delegates has been excellent and similar events between IKT and IXC are now planned to help develop academic and business engagement.
