Have you helped shape the direction of the future Faraday Institution programme? Ian Ellerington, Head of Technology Transfer, discusses the outcomes of the first three Wave 2 project workshops.
Now that the Fast Start projects are underway we have been reaching out to the energy storage community in its widest sense to seek a broad range of views on the future direction for our organisation’s research and training programmes. We have done so by holding a series of workshops to identify UK priorities for research and infrastructure capability. Our workshops in Sheffield, Edinburgh and Newcastle were attended by over 100 contributors from academia, industry, and, in some cases, local government. From industry we have received input from auto manufacturers, energy companies, the supply chain, as well as from technology start-ups, on some of the most pressing problems they are facing.
The events have captured a wide range of views that inevitably exist within this space and have also identified some specific local infrastructure requirements. One theme we heard consistently about research priorities was a desire for the Faraday Institution to look beyond Li-ion batteries to other technologies. Attendees tended to agree that the UK has good existing electrochemistry and energy storage research facilities but that its full extent is not widely known, and it is not always easy to access. One action from these workshops that is already clear to us is the need to better signpost UK researchers to the facilities that are available. We will publish the final consolidated outputs from the workshops on the Faraday Institution website in mid-November (individual contributors will not be identified).
If you have not already done so, you can still contribute to this process. We invite you to join us at our event in Oxfordshire on the 15 October. Registration closes on the 8 October.
I’d like to end this update with two requests to researchers:
- Please make me aware of any enquiries you receive from industry regarding potential collaborations.
- If any group working on Faraday Institution workstreams suspects the research they are carrying out has generated, or is likely to generate, patentable IP please inform me as well as the technology transfer office of their university. It is important that we have a broad overview because adding together inventions from different teams could have far more impact than treating them all individually. Please don’t include any technical details to avoid risk of accidental disclosure. We intend to cover this subject in a future newsletter, but in the meantime please download a set of slides regarding the protection of IP that was presented by patent lawyers, Withers and Rogers, at the 4-month review. Many thanks.
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