The awards this time round went to Westminster, Bath, Cardiff, City and Leeds Universities working with BBC teams from Childrens, Learning, Information and Archives, BBC Yorkshire and the audio and accessibility teams and behavioural science centre within BBC Research and Development.

It's one thing to successfully undertake this cross disciplinary research between two organizations with vastly differing cultures and timescales, quite another to disseminate the findings in meaningful ways. For academia, the tradition has been somewhat more straightforward: conference papers, book chapters, presentations at academic symposia - and these are all recognized measures of success. For the BBC, however, measuring the impact of such knowledge exchange partnerships is altogether trickier since it involves 'softer' more intrinsic impacts such as the general creation of knowledge networks, a fluid two way knowledge transfer pathway, and the application of existing knowledge in new contexts. But with academia now charged by government to make research more relevant, both socially and economically, strategic partnerships like this one can go quite a way to delivering to this impact agenda. So what of the findings from the 5 KI Awards? The results are already tangible. For example,clear recommendations that there are design opportunities as far as Electronic Programme Guides are concerned has been identified by the University of Bath and BBC R&D. This is with respect to the motivation of older users in the drive to greater take-up of digital services amongst this age bracket. The study suggests that EPGs could record and share viewer selections, in an Amazon business model approach, so as to automatically predict viewer preferences and use these as the basis for advertising interactive content in this way. Overall, the emphasis on older viewers' motivations, rather than their cognitive or perceptual limitations, is a very important shift of focus and opens new avenues for accessibility research which will inform ongoing research in BBC R&D for a considerable time to come. University of Westminster has identified a real community of interest comprising academics and producers around the potential of virtual environments and this is a valuable resource in the exploration of public service virtuality. The study showed that older children need to be offered sociable environments online, but younger children find some interest in solo play in immersive media. All useful stuff in designing new virtual spaces for young people.. The BBC Blast study, Alone Together? from University of Bath brilliantly demonstrated, the first time around, the value of its partnership with BBC Learning in that it directly impacted on the Blast site re-launch earlier this year.

This time round, the investigation into comparable websites has produced a critical analysis of the ways and means through which Blast can fulfil its aims and objectives around what a learning environment should look like, and how design and management modifications can facilitate this. The data collected in this study has fed into the future design of Blast and provided a deeper understanding of the potential and actual audiences the site is trying to attract. Cardiff University's study into news provision for younger audiences, What do Children Want from the BBC? Children's content and participatory environments in an age of Citizen Media, has provided data around the 'transitional' audience - that's young people at the upper end of the Newsround target audience (8-12 year olds) and those just falling outside of it - and their own ideas about whether or not it's a good idea to have a news service specifically for their age group, and all the evidence suggests that there is. Open Archive: The Miners Strike: A Case Study in Regional Context, led by Leeds University and BBC Yorkshire, with BBC Information and Archive, has gone so far as to produce eleven short films made by a representative sample of people involved in the 1984 miners strike in order to assess ways in which public audiences and communities could interact, contextualize and deepen the value of the BBC's archive. The films are a clear demonstration of the potential for direct community engagement in the development of broadcast materials and in the active interpretation of archival materials working with this group. Excerpts will be used on the BBC Yorkshire site where geographically appropriate. So, that's a snapshot of some of the top level findings these studies have delivered. As they filter through the relevant echelons of the BBC and take hold in a variety of ways, they are further evidence that this model of engagement with academia is worth mutating, if not replicating. Conversations with academics from disciplines which can map directly onto BBC R&D's strategy and workplan are the real driver for future partnerships, and will include partnering with the research councils. We're delighted by the recent announcement that the EPSRC has greenlit funding for a feasibility study into an online collaborative knowledge exchange network between media professionals and academic researchers. This is to be led by Professor David Gauntlett from the University of Westminster together with Dr. Lizzie Jackson from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication
The AHRC and the BBC will be key stakeholders. The potential of a formal framework to engage with the whole range of the UK's creative industries, as represented by the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network and its relevance to R&D's portfolio is a rich seam worth exploring. The idea, for example, that early stage R&D can be made available to content providers across a range of creative disciplines is an exciting possibility. Time to put the kettle on.

Cardiff University
Cardiff University partnered with BBC Childrens: What do Children want from the BBC? Children's content and participatory environments in an age of citizen media

Westminster University
Westminster University partnered with BBC Childrens: Audience and Producer Engagement with Immersive Worlds

City University
City University partnered with BBC Learning: 'Alone Together?'

Leeds University
Leeds University partnered with BBC Yorkshire and BBC North Information and Archives

Bath University
Bath University partnered with BBC Research and Development

A 90 strong audience consisting of academics, BBC staff, innovation funding bodies such as the Technology Strategy Board and the wider media industry heard the head of BBC Research & Development put into context the importance of the collaboration between the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the value of knowledge transfer at this level to keep the BBC at the leading edge of innovation.

The day showcased the collaborative research projects supported through our pilot funding call. As well as displays from 7 projects highlighting outcomes and findings we also had project presentations in the Big Room from the following projects:

• Claire Wardle: User Generated Content and its impact upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and the BBC (this session was blogged by one of the original lead partners, Robin Hamman, now at Headshift.
• Heather Powell: Open Archive: The Miners Strike - A Case Study in Regional Content
• David Gauntlett & Lizzie Jackson: Audience and Producer Engagement with Immersive Worlds (case study: Adventure Rock)

Our current partnership model with the AHRC has been a pilot and very successful for that. It's allowed us to be pioneering in the way we work, accept that our learning journey has provided us with some key 'do's and don'ts' for collaborative working practices between two large and disparate communities, and at the same time delivered a bunch of terrific recommendations based on in depth audience behaviour analysis around areas such as accessibility, community, learning and user generated content. The research papers can be found below in PDF format. We are currently awaiting 1 more and will upload as soon as we have it.

UGC at the BBC
Alone Together? Social Learning in BBC Blast
A Public Voice - Access, Digital Story and Interactive Narrative
Children in Virtual Worlds
Virtual Worlds - An Overview and Study of BBC Children's Adventure Rock
Inhibited Exploration in Older Customers of Digital Services
Listener Online Engagement with BBC Radio Programming
Radio listeners online - A case study of The Archers
The Miners' Strike - A Case Study in Regional Content

The event will be held at Wallace Space in St Pancras, London and will start at 11am. There are still a few (free) tickets left so please contact Louise Elliot at the AHRC on L.Elliott@ahrc.ac.uk to reserve a place. A full agenda for the event can be found here: agenda.pdf

So where did the journey begin? The collaborative partnership between the Arts and Humanities Research Council and BBC Research & Development (a part of BBC Future Media and Technology) started over coffee in the American Bagel Company on Praed Street, Paddington in November 2005. I'd just come back after maternity leave and my then boss Matt Locke suggested I meet with the then head of Knowledge Transfer at the AHRC, Julie Taylor to discuss how our two communities might indeed transfer knowledge, ideas, and collaborative working practices for the good of all concerned.

With a roughly matched potential community of 26,000 arts and humanities academics and around 20,000 (at the time) BBC employees it certainly seemed a good fit in terms of numbers never mind the enormous wealth of talent, expertise and sheer depth of knowledge within academia. This knowledge had enormous synergy with areas of interest in BBC FM+T: Audience behaviour with regard to digital technology; the barriers and incentives to take-up of digital services; editorial challenges around user generated content; the opportunities afforded by mobile devices; children/young people as early adopters and the whole gamut of how multimedia plays out in people's everyday lives.

To start with we set out an exploratory agenda to discover how our two communities might collaborate on common ground. This took the form of a series of themed 'collaborative inquiry summits' hosted during the first half of 2006 which explored key themes such as mobile communication, user generated content and archive content. By the middle of that year we had enough evidence to suggest that a second, more formalised phase of the partnership would be beneficial and we set about building a business case for a formal strategic partnership between the two organisations under the AHRC's Knowledge Exchange Partnership.

Launched in January 2007, eight collaborative research projects were green lit which ran for between nine and twelve months. They have delivered a range of insights into the changing behaviour of BBC audiences as well as enabling the academic community to gain unprecedented access to the BBC. Once these papers have been made public they will be linked to through this blog. The success of the eight projects has resulted in a further injection of funding into five of the projects. This phase of knowledge infusion launched in mid January 2009 and digs deeper into particular aspects of the original collaborative research projects. These projects are due to deliver in late spring 2009.

As well as the pilot funding call we have also taken the ground-breaking step of embedding an academic from Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Dr. Claire Wardle into BBC Nations and Regions New Media in Birmingham. The placement runs for six months and started in February 2009. During her time there, Claire is working to disseminate the findings of her twelve month study into UGC and News - the biggest of its kind in terms of BBC UGC. Working closely with Laura Ellis, BBC Birmingham's Head of New Media, she is helping devise and implement a strategy for community producers across nations and regions.

So far this partnership has developed a range of new models of collaborative innovation for the BBC. Already there are tangible outcomes from the eight collaborative research projects which are being taken up by the partner divisions with whom the academics have been working closely and are also feeding into the BBC's top level strategic initiatives such as Media Literacy. The second round of funding will provide working proofs of concept and prototypes to compliment the body of research already produced. It's often said that innovation comes from the bottom where exploration happens. The AHRC/BBC KEP has shown that exploration, coupled with collaborative partnerships which are working effectively, can deliver great value for both sides. We are continually fine tuning that relationship to discover what other exciting territory this partnership might cover both now and in the future.

Rowena