UCL Enterprise -­‐ Website Portal for SME Engagement with Universities Design & Development Brief Contact: Krista Macmillan, Database and Website Manager, UCL Enterprise Operations Email: k.macmillan@ucl.ac.uk Tel: 020 3108 3285 UCL Enterprise Enterprise is important to all universities, but resonates particularly with UCL. From our inception we were created as an enterprising institution, with a bold ambition to create a University dedicated to the greatest good for the greatest number. This principle has underpinned the evolution of modern-­‐day UCL, a confident and enthusiastic community of enterprising researchers, educators, and scholars, working together for the immediate, medium and long-­‐term benefit of society. UCL Enterprise provides UCL’s structures for engaging with business for commercial and societal benefit. It includes three units: UCL Advances, UCL Business and UCL Consultants. Together, they provide access to the capabilities and resources of the UCL community to help businesses start, grow and develop Project Summary Currently SME’s cannot easily identify and access opportunities to engage with London universities. Information is often disparate and inaccessible within a single institution, let alone across all London universities. As a result, both universities and SMEs are missing opportunities to engage productively for commercial and societal benefit. SME’s should be able to identify clearly what opportunities there are for engaging with London universities and to be able to access the relevant information quickly and easily. Opportunities to engage should be accessible regardless of institutional boundaries. In order to address the problem, UCL Enterprise is creating a website portal which will facilitate SME engagement with London universities. Examples of engagement include: •
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Partnering on research calls/funding bids that require KT impact Collaboration on research projects that require SME input Training Mentoring Business support activities Consultancy contracts Tendering/Procurement (SME as university supplier) Access to university run services and facilities Access to researchers to help overcome technical/development issues Development In the initial phase of development, the website will bring together existing resources, signposting to static content and using automated feeds (incl. 3rd party content) for dynamic content. The initial site will be used to demonstrate purpose and value to SME’s and other institutions and to attract funding for future development. Although the initial site will be fairly basic, our chosen development platform is Drupal as future development will require a robust CMS to be accessed by multiple user types and additional functionality including database search of multiple data sources. However, this is currently outside of the scope of this project. Design The design of the site should be modern and clean with usability as a priority. The site should allow SME’s to navigate through information from multiple sources without apparent boundaries. Essentially, SME’s need to find it easy and worthwhile to use the site to access opportunities to engage with universities or the portal will not fulfil its objective. Branding will not be institution specific but will need to incorporate all contributing institutions’ logos. Deliverables •
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Site design including site architecture Development of initial site on Drupal platform Upload of site to external web host and initial user support on implementation An awareness of the long-­‐term aims of the site should be demonstrated and the ability to scale and build in capacity for future phases of development is a requirement. Timescale It is anticipated that initial development will be completed by 12th November 2012. Proposals should be submitted by 24th September 2012 and should include a schedule of work against deliverables and costs.