Posted: Friday, 20th April 2012
MMU has secured £100,000 funding to set up a social networking platform which will allow North West SMEs to ‘pick the brains’ of the institutions along the Corridor.
The funding, which comes from JISC (an organisation dedicated to promoting digital technologies for education and research) will be used to develop the platform together with local businesses over the next year.
Named myKE (my Knowledge Exchange), the platform is the brainchild of MMU business development manager Michael Daw, who said: “Businesses may not always be aware of what expertise is available from knowledge providers such as universities, the NHS, libraries or museums and these organisations are often large and difficult to navigate.
“myKE aims to develop a social networking platform to help small to medium-sized businesses exploit valuable resources, services and expertise to fuel growth and innovation.”
mySpace
The platform will use a similar system to mySpace but rather than sharing music or videos it will support the sharing of expertise, services and knowledge.
myKE will initially focus on three of the local economy’s most important sectors – digital, advanced manufacturing and healthcare – but will eventually be rolled to other sectors of the economy.
The first stage in the development of the platform is to work with local SMEs to assess their needs and see how myKE can best be developed to meet them.
Michael added: “We have invited SMEs to co-develop the platform. We will look at what has worked in the past, or what barriers businesses have had accessing knowledge and what can be done to improve this.”
- The project, which counts Corridor Manchester, MMU, University of Manchester, TRUSTECH (NHS) and Manchester Science Parks as partners, is supported by the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership and Manchester Digital Development Agency.