This year’s Knowledge Exchange (KE) Awards are open for nominations from 9th June to 21st July 2021. The awards were launched at PraxisAuril’s 2021 conference ‘Review, Regroup, Revolution’ by PraxisAuril CEO, Maxine Ficarra, and PraxisAuril founder and Patron, Dr David Secher.
The KE Awards are organised by PraxisAuril, the UK’s world-leading professional association for Knowledge Exchange practitioners. The Awards showcase and celebrate the role of KE professionals in facilitating economic, social and cultural impact from the research base through collaboration with external partners. Such collaborations are so important to our post-pandemic recovery, as well as to ongoing national R&D strategy.
"COVID has shown how important KE is in times of crisis and, throughout the UK, KE professionals have risen to the challenge during the past year. We look forward to reading examples of outstanding contributions and to recognising excellence, wherever it has occurred."
- David Secher, PraxisAuril Founder and Patron
Recognising KE in crisis mode
This year has undoubtedly been challenging and thought-provoking. Since the last KE awards in June 2020, the KE community has dug deeper and pushed harder to make sure business support, research collaboration, new company creation – and more – have been launched, supported and sustained. So, this year the KE Awards will include a ‘Pandemic Pivot of the Year’ award in recognition of the amazing responses of our community to the crisis.
Rewarding diversity in KE
The KE Awards celebrate a wide range of KE roles and activity across the Knowledge Exchange community. This year, award entries across all categories are also being encouraged to highlight specific Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Responsible Innovation related approaches that have contributed to the success of the submission. A commitment to support EDI throughout the KE sector will be a plank of PraxisAuril’s activity across the next year, and beyond.
The full list of categories for 2021 are:
- KE Partnership of the Year
- Academic Engagement Initiative of the Year
- KE Deal of the Year
- KE Team of the Year
- Place-Based Initiative of the Year
- KE Volunteer of the Year
- Pandemic Pivot of the Year
The KE Awards are open to all individuals and organisations working in Knowledge Exchange and are not limited to PraxisAuril members. Finalists will be announced later in the year, with the KE Awards ceremony itself taking place on 18th November 2021.
“The KE Awards help us to showcase the stories of success in KE from a wide range of organisations, projects and teams – and support PrA in our strategic aim to amplify the message to key policy and funding stakeholders about the impact of diverse PrA member approaches to KE.”
- Maxine Ficarra, PraxisAuril CEO
Learn about our seven winners of 2020 on our website or watch the winner’s interviews on our PraxisAuril YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/3x5asua.
We are delighted that the KE Awards will once again be sponsored by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), an organisation that works in partnership with universities, research organisations, businesses, charities, and government to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish.
“UK Research and Innovation is delighted to support the PraxisAuril KE Awards again this year. As a steward to the Research and Innovation ecosystem, UKRI is delighted to partner with PraxisAuril to recognise and reward all those involved in realising the impact from research through knowledge exchange. KE professionals play an important role helping research to make an impact on society and the economy. This important role of KE professionals has been further exemplified during the extremely challenging year of the pandemic.”
- Dr Tony Soteriou, Director of Commercialisation, UKRI
To learn more about the KE Awards, and to submit at entry, please visit www.keawards.org.uk
Enquiries to Leanne Kenyon, Marketing Executive, PraxisAuril