City scores highly on commercialisation and intellectual property

By City Press Office (City Press Office), Published

The results of the second Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF2) were announced on Tuesday 27 September 2022.

City, University of London is among the universities which score the highest marks on the KEF metric linked to commercialisation of its research. Of the higher education institutions listed in the top quintile for the estimated average turnover of their companies built on their research, City is in a group that is comprised primarily by large Russell Group members.

The KEF is an assessment of how English universities serve the economy and society for the benefit of the public, business, and the community. City’s very good performance in the KEF shows that its academics engage in a wide range of interactions with business, practice and the professions.

KEF is a key element of Research England’s benchmarking of universities, alongside the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and Research Excellence Framework (REF).

It shows performance across seven ‘Perspectives’: research partnerships, working with businesses, working with the public and third sectors, skills, enterprise and entrepreneurship, local growth and regeneration, intellectual property (IP) and commercialisation, and public and community engagement.

Drawing largely on data taken from the Higher Education Business and Community Interaction survey, and data from Innovate UK and the academic publisher, Elsevier, universities are divided into performance bands for each perspective, including, working with business, continuous professional development and graduate start-ups, promoting local growth, research partnerships and working with the public and third sector.

Universities are also grouped into “clusters” so their results can be compared against similar institutions, though no overall ranking is provided.

City also scores high for interactions with business professions and commercial sector, in courses for business and the community, and in having a high number of graduate start-ups, according to the KEF dashboard.

Speaking about City’s strong performance on the commercialisation and intellectual property metric, Professor Miguel Mera, Vice President (Research) said:

“I am pleased with these results which show good improvement in a number of key KEF ‘perspectives.’ I am delighted that we are significantly outperforming our cluster in the commercialisation and intellectual property areas as well as in contract research and consultancy, and we continue to undertake excellent work in supporting and developing graduate startups. There is lots of great work happening across the institution that we can enhance in the future.”