Consultation on the design of the KEF: our response

The KEF is being developed by Research England with the aim of increasing efficiency and effectiveness in the use of public funding for knowledge exchange. This consultation was used to gather stakeholders’ views on its proposed design and implementation.

We and our membership believe that the KEF has potential to help business schools measure and evaluate their knowledge exchange activity and provide potential partners in industry with opportunities for collaborative engagement.

However, the Framework’s proposed cluster groupings do not adequately support comparison of institutions in different clusters. Potential business partners would benefit greatly from being able to make these comparisons and we would like to see the Framework altered to reflect this. We would also welcome the addition of a supplementary narrative to help capture those knowledge exchange activities which cannot be captured by metrics, and propose further revision of the existing proposed metrics to better capture knowledge exchange.

You can read and download our full response here.