Surrey's Leadership Academy leads new ways of innovating during difficult economic conditions
Thursday 23 April 2009
The University of Surrey has been successful in its £600,000 bid to the Higher Education Funding Council’s new Economic Challenge Investment Fund (ECIF). The aim of the £50m ECIF scheme is to help vulnerable individuals and businesses (particularly small and medium-sized enterprises and voluntary organisations) through the recession, by securing the skills they need to protect employment. This includes development and training for those in work to enable them to continue in employment rather than be made redundant and training and development for those newly unemployed to improve their chances of re-employment.
The University’s Leadership Academy for Innovation, Leadership and Recovery will seek to work with organisations at risk – specifically, to support SME owners and directors in developing new ways of innovating during difficult economic conditions. This will be achieved through an action learning approach which will help group members to address issues including liquidity and management of cash flow, customer retention, staffing levels and maintenance of core skills during the economic downturn. It will also seek to equip unemployed managers and executives with the personal skills and motivation necessary to get them back into work, and to help those at risk of redundancy to analyse and refocus their skills in order to sustain economic activity. This will be achieved through a coordinated programme of coaching, mentoring and action learning workshops. The Leadership Academy will work closely with the Regional Development Agency (SEEDA) and other key support agencies in the region to ensure this initiative is part of a coordinated framework of support for regional businesses – offering robust and innovative support during the downturn, and positioning the South East for economic recovery.
Leadership Academy Director, Professor David Gray commented: “We and our partners, the Open University Business School, Royal Holloway, the University of Greenwich and the Tavistock Institute, London are all delighted to be collaborating on this important new project. These are obviously very difficult times for many individuals and businesses. We intend to bring together leading academics from higher education, private providers of leadership development and those offering innovation advice to deliver world class leadership thinking and promote skills for innovation in business development. We cannot make the recession go away. However, we are confident that, through our collaborative initiatives, we can deliver practical help and advice to individuals and businesses that can fundamentally shift their strategy and recovery opportunities.”
Media Enquiries
Peter La, Press Office at the University of Surrey, Tel: +44 (0)1483 689191, or Email mediarelations@surrey.ac.uk
