Interface – The Knowledge Connection for Business

Scotland’s business base is predominantly made up of micro businesses employing less than 10 employees (94%) and historically very few in this group have engaged with academia. Not only are companies unsure of the best means of engaging and often lacking the resource to pursue this, the financial returns available to universities and research institutes from working with small businesses are often not sufficient to justify significant engagement.

A core part of the rationale for establishing Interface was to help overcome these challenges by creating a mechanism to enable SMEs, particularly micro and small enterprises, to engage with the academic base in Scotland. By providing a central hub through which businesses can engage with academia and taking away the need to approach several institutions individually, Interface helps to make the engagement process more cost effective for businesses. Interface also makes engagement with SMEs more cost effective for higher education institutions (HEIs) by helping businesses to clearly articulate how HEIs might be able to assist them. In doing this, Interface also helps to identify those businesses for which academic assistance is likely to be of the greatest benefit.

Interface has developed an active relationship with all 23 HEIs and research institutes in Scotland, as well as Scotland’s eight specialised Innovation Centres, in order to fully maximise the opportunity for innovation and commercialisation of new ideas.