Sustaining and Embedding Innovations - wiki JISC Sustaining and Embedding Innovations / Business opportunities
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Business opportunities

Institutions and projects should consider business opportunities that may arise from the development of products and expertise as a result of innovation projects. There could be potential markets in the UK and overseas, particularly as HEIs and FECs have built considerable expertise from investments in innovation projects by key agencies such as HEFCE, HEFCW, JISC, SFC, Higher Education Academy and Becta. It is highly likely that overseas HEIs would want to draw on such experience and expertise in their modernisation programmes and many may be willing to pay for this (either directly or via funding/aid programmes). It would have to be remembered that agency-funded projects normally stipulate that project outputs are to be made freely available to the sector, however value-added services could be developed around such outputs. As an example, the University of Hertfordshire has developed a change management process (called CABLE – Change Academy for Blended Learning Enhancement), based on the Higher Education Academy Change Academy and it has now built on this with a service called CABLE Transfer, where the University offers a service to other HEIs to transfer the skills and expertise in implementing the change process, so that others can implement the model itself.  The CABLE Transfer site utilises the Ning social network and contains a range of resources that other HEIs can use to implement the CABLE change process. 

 

Other “business” opportunities could include:

 

  • Selling learning content.
  • Selling toolkits and resources.
  • Selling expertise and services.
  • Developing business partnerships with other institutions and/or the private sector

 

 

The following section considers 'open' approaches to sustaining and embedding innovations but it need not be a case of “either/or” – commercial approaches can easily sit alongside open approaches. For example, a community could develop an open software system and then commercial companies could provide value-added products/ services around the system e.g. training, support, customisation, additional templates. This happens, for example, with open-source content management systems, such as Joomla and Drupal