The science and engineering business development team at a London university wanted to move away from PowerPoint-heavy networking events and toward conversation-based workshops that produced real partnerships. We designed and facilitated a half-day workshop for 20 businesses and academics in the smart home industry, with Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and Innovate UK funding as the goal.
We worked with the science and engineering business development team at a London university to organise a half-day workshop for businesses and researchers in the “smart home” industry.
The event would give businesses access to academics at the cutting edge of research, and provide academics with the opportunity to apply their research in the real world.
The university was keen to get away from the usual PowerPoint-heavy format for such events, and move to a much more natural, conversation-based approach to making valuable connections.
We started by facilitating an “introductions” session, where each participant could briefly explain their key area of interest, plus what they ideally wanted to achieve from the workshop.
Then, participants were invited to engage in quick-fire discussions to brainstorm potential areas for collaboration. The ultimate aim was to identify opportunities for Knowledge Transfer Partnerships or Innovate UK funding.
We asked each participant to fill out a “Discovery Form” along the way, which helped them record the outcomes of their discussions, and also provided feedback to the organisers on what ground was covered during the event.
Several successful partnerships were formed with a view to applying for project funding.
Most networking events fail because the format works against the goal. PowerPoint, polite questions at the end, lukewarm coffee in the break, no structured way for the right two people to find each other. The shift that makes them work is treating the workshop as a discovery process rather than a presentation, with the facilitator's job being to surface the questions each participant is actually trying to answer.
A simple Discovery Form filled in along the way is a more useful artefact than a stack of business cards, because it gives the organisers a record of what ground was actually covered and which conversations have legs. The lesson I am carrying forward into similar industry-academic events: design every minute of the agenda around the question of who needs to talk to whom, and what they need to leave knowing.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
