About innovation at Surrey

Since its inception, the University of Surrey has supported knowledge exchange (KE) through collaboration with business and industry, much of which has been facilitated by the Surrey Research Park (SRP). Founded in 1984, SRP occupies 28.5h within the University’s grounds, and supports c170 businesses. Together with SRP, the University’s KE activities contributed c8,500 jobs and made a gross value added (GVA) contribution to the UK economy of £850m in 2018/19, an increase of 3% since 2015/16.

Surrey Research Park has proven instrumental in the creation of the Guildford digital games industry, with 70 companies contributing c1,000 jobs and £64m GVA to the local economy, including via the Park’s own RocketDesk.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is the concept that research and innovative practices should take into account the wider socio-economic impacts of the work beyond that of simply furthering the knowledge of humanity. As such, the goal should be that we, as researchers, scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs “make new technologies work for society, without causing more problems than they solve.”

While there is no definitive set of criteria by which we can judge an innovation is, or is not, responsible, there is a consensus amongst funding bodies, commercial enterprises, and academics regarding general principles that researchers should endeavour to follow.

1. That innovation should have value for society.
2. That the innovator should consider all possible impacts.
3. That the participation of stakeholders is important throughout all stages of the development process.
4. That there should be transparent governance and oversight for the innovation to be truly responsible.

Our research and innovation strategy aligns our internal resources and focuses them to generate positive impact for society in a way which is co-ordinated to the wishes of our staff and students; our local community; our regional economy; and the wider world.

Our strategy is an integrated framework, recognising that innovation flows seamlessly from research, and by innovation, we imply broadly all societal benefit that accrues from our research – not only its monetisation, as important as that is.

View our full research and innovation strategy

We define Innovation as making use of Knowledge Exchange (KE) to turn research outcomes into actions that make real world impact.

Our priorities for KE feed into our Research and Innovation strategy and can be summarised into four key objectives:

1. Scale Innovation: Scale innovation to become a mainstream activity within our academic community by educating, stimulating, and facilitating innovation activities.
2. KE Pathways: Build upon existing successful KE pathways (such as IP commercialisation and business collaboration) to broaden KE activities to strengthen public and community engagement and policy development, thereby, leading our region in societal and behavioural change as well as product and service innovation.
3. Innovation Ecosystem: Optimise our Innovation Ecosystem to facilitate external engagement, enabling businesses to boost productivity and prosperity in our region, encouraging investment in R&D, supporting non-business partners to enhance society and maximising student and researcher employability skills and experience.
4. KE Partnerships: Build new KE partnerships across a wide geography, supporting skills transfer and intelligent investment in future infrastructure and policy, contributing our regional skills to levelling up across the UK.

We make use of our Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) to support our KE Strategy and Scale Innovation activity. Our HEIF accountability statement (PDF) sets out our funding plans to 2025.