Dr Robert Willis, Director of Research Students, has been successful in a bid for £60,200 from the Intellectual Property Office, one of twelve entries awarded funding for ground breaking projects to turn ideas into business reality.

This project will be based on collaboration between Anglia Ruskin University and SmartLIFE, the Hive New Education and Enterprise Park (Cambridge). The overall objective is to build a training, publication and knowledge transfer network to provide training opportunities and create a forum for the dissemination of ideas in the development of sustainable enterprise and Intellectual Property.

The project will produce an online open access repository 'wiki', which will allow for the continuous exchange of knowledge and highlight emergent Intellectual Property opportunities. This will be supported by a series of workshops, providing training focusing on the impact of research and developing a fast track route for the exploitation of opportunities in the specific area of Clean Tech construction and Social Enterprise sectors.

The competition was open to UK universities and Public Sector Research Establishments (PSRE) and saw over 77 entries. This is the third year of the Fast Forward competition which has provided £2 million in funding to 35 projects since the competition started in 2010.