Centre for Enhancement of the Environment and Innovation

FIONA MCCORMACK

Innovation and environment pervades the Thrive 28 strategy and transcends subject areas in BNU. The recent COP conference highlights how important it is for society to embrace the issue of sustainability and take measures to protect the global environment for future generations. Innovation plays a central role in addressing environmental sustainability across many of the areas of interest of the university.

This centre will involve staff across the university with an interest in Environment and Innovation, which will build on our existing research strengths in Art and Design, Human and Social Sciences, Aviation and Security and Business and Law. Alongside academic staff the centre will work with our Head of Sustainability to explore opportunities for collaborative work within our directorates. This will provide a springboard to engage with business, external organisations and community projects to enhance our civic engagement.

The aim for the first year of this centre is to identify and develop four distinct research areas with a critical mass of staff to build research energy and focus on reporting impact. It is anticipated that this activity will feed into some of the Units of Assessment for REF as their impact case studies, and also the improved research focus will help to enhance the environment statements.

The likely area of interest for this Centre are:

‐ Sustainable Design and Production

‐ Developing Innovation and Entrepreneurship

‐ Sustainability and Higher Education

‐ Sustainability in Sport, Leisure, Travel and Tourism

The Centre will support staff to work more closely in creating credible research profiles which will in turn facilitate successful funding bids. This will also enable research groups to attract high calibre applications for PG research degrees - currently an area that we are under-represented in within the profile of research students. To do this we will focus on developing PhD supervision experience and external publication profiles. The Centre will focus on supporting early career researchers to engage in meaningful and impactful research activity, while developing their skills to become research leaders of the future.