A dedicated team will turn university research on engineering services—like maintenance contracts for trains or power plants—into practical tools that companies can use directly. The problem is a persistent gap between academic research and industrial adoption. UK universities produce valuable knowledge about how manufacturers can profit from offering services alongside their products, but academics lack the time and incentive to package this knowledge for real-world use. Without translation, the research sits unused, and the UK loses the economic benefit. This programme bridges that gap by identifying promising research outputs, building them into usable tools, and testing them with industry partners. If successful, manufacturers of complex engineering systems—rail transport, power generation, medical equipment—could adopt new service models more quickly. That would keep more of the value chain inside the UK, strengthening the economy in a sector most people never think about but rely on daily. The project is not fundamental science; it is applied knowledge transfer. Its impact depends entirely on whether the tools it creates actually get used by companies.
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To succeed in today's highly competitive markets the UK needs to focus on using the ideas and technologies produced by the country's strong science base to create both innovative products and associated services. The development of product-related services is particularly important in ensuring that a greater proportion of the value created remains within the UK. The growth of service provision is increasingly common amongst manufacturers of complex engineering solutions, such as rail transport or power generation systems. Recent research in this area is creating valuable new knowledge to underpin this growth. However, there is a need to translate the research outputs into a form suitable for adoption by industry. University academics - under pressure to move on to new projects and develop their careers - are not well placed to perform this task. This programme aims to bridge this knowledge transfer gap, specifically in relation to engineering-based services. It will develop ways to turn the new knowledge created into practical tools and techniques which specialist teams of practitioners can apply in companies.The proposed activities fall into three parts:1. Identifying research outputs that can be developed into tools. These outputs may be the result of specific research programmes by individual universities or the amalgamation of outputs from different research areas and universities that can be combined to develop more powerful tools.2. The creation of the tools by a dedicated team of tool developers. The teams will be based both in the universities and with industrial partners.3. The piloting and refinement of tools with industrial partners and other companies. This will be performed by specialist tool developers, industrial partner representatives and consultants associated with the universities.
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