Here at the Management School, we believe that business and management is an applied discipline. The big benefit of working with businesses as we develop the research is to ensure that it has a maximum impact, both academically, in terms of research, and in society, and therefore, it's absolutely vital that we're going to engage and share research and learn from all of our stakeholders. It's very important to us in LUMS that we do work that has an impact on the world and has the ability to change and influence business practice and policy too. I think it's important to work with the university to gain lots of different perspectives and also use their skills that they bring to it in involving lots of stakeholders as well, so getting that rounder picture helps to shape policy for the district's future. For LUMS, responsibility is an absolutely critical part of what we do; it drives our research and is a way of bringing our research together. It also informs our behaviours and our attitudes, and sort of underpinning that, or aligned with that, is the idea of the civic management school, and for us in the management school at doing our research, it has got to have value and impact at a societal level, so we have a long and very rich tradition of actually having impact on businesses and organisational development and leadership and management development within the northwest region, which has then subsequently been rolled out nationally. In LUMS, our research is committed to making a positive societal impact, so that we can improve and change people's lives and have that impact for organisations and society.

So the Technology and Professional Services project works really closely with businesses that we've recruited and brought into the adoption programme for those businesses. There's a range of different benefits. Obviously, they benefit from the academic insights that we bring as researchers, but we also allow them to network with one another and learn from each other through the mechanisms that we've developed here at Lancaster to allow peer collaboration. And on top of that, we also provide them with an ability to understand what's happening across the academic research landscape and make new connections, develop a wider awareness of topics that perhaps they wouldn't have encountered if they're not engaged with researchers that had that broader view of what's happening in the academic landscape. So the work that I'm doing in health services across the UK and internationally, in essence, is kind of focused on - how do we create the conditions within health service organisations where high quality, continually improving and compassionate care will be delivered for patients, but also how do we create the conditions where we are providing high-quality compassionate support for staff because those two things go together.

I've done a number of different things with the Management School over the past 10 years or more. The great thing that working with experts at the University gives you is it just allays some of those fears that you have with carrying that kind of impostor syndrome around with you where you've actually really learned about leadership skills and you've never really come into this with an MBA in management like with the same skills that we find with them, so it just helps to cement some really good practices and systems into the way that you run the business. It is really important for Lancaster University Management School to work with local and regional businesses; we're embedded in Lancaster, and we are really a local entity; we have students who are eager to learn about the local and regional businesses; we are connected with the local and regional businesses for our research, so Lancaster University should tie everything together.

There's so many benefits for us for working with Lancaster University Management School. It's helped educate us, inform our teams about decisions we should be making from a sustainability point of view. It's helping us to develop our environmental strategies going forwards, to understand what we need to do with our customers and with our packaging to help our environment and our communities.

So true to Marketplace and I, we've engaged with people with disabilities in various ways. Firstly, people with disabilities have actually visited our exhibitions and seen the artworks themselves and seen other people's experiences of disabilities. Secondly, we've engaged businesses in accessibility training around disability. Various organisations that we've worked with either have people who have visual or hidden disabilities or indeed people who work who know someone with a disability. We've helped organisations to improve their accessibility plans, their accessibility manifestos and how they actually create initiatives which are bespoke towards disability-led audiences.

Working with Lancaster University has been important in that they have a deep understanding of disability that pairs really well with where we stand in the community as an FE specialist college. The relationship was very natural; we come from the very same place, and it was just a natural partnership for the local companies that we're working with. I think we're seeing proactive change and the way that they're addressing accessibility, and I think what's really cool about that is the fact that they are making changes that they are not just being tokenistic and saying: "Oh yeah, we'll get to that someday" or "we've put out a statement". They're actually learning BSL, sign language. They're changing their signage. They're having disability champions. They're making sure that they're talking about disability and accessibility concerns in their quarterly meetings; it's gendered as a point to make sure that they're working and improving on that. That's only positive. There's only positivity that can come from that in the future. So that's the benefits that I see. The benefits we can bring to our surrounding regions are primarily because we work at that international and global level, so we can take things back to the regions while we take the businesses in the regions forward as well, again to that circular process that one kind of feeds into the other.

TIPS stands for Technology in Professional Services, and by that, we mean mainly law and accountancy. What we're trying to do is help those, especially mid-tier and smaller law and accountancy firms, adopt digital technology, sometimes involving AI, but not necessarily. I think research needs to be practically engaged and have impact in the real world, partly because we're funded in part by public money, and we want to add to the stock of knowledge, but also have an immediate effect on business success, social and economic change. For example, in the TIPS project, we hope to help things like access to justice and help SMEs access professional services more cheaply and effectively, so it has a wider economic and social benefit. And so that wider social benefit is in some senses what makes us get up in the morning and do this work, because we want to change things. We are very passionate about responsible management and about giving back to our community, also about being a good citizen in Lancaster. So instead of thinking about the place or researching the place from our offices, we come to the place and we come and immerse ourselves in the environment so that we understand much better how our ecosystem operates and how we can add value as a university.

We're so fortunate to have the iConnect project team on our doorstep and one of the top 10 universities. It isn't just their knowledge and academic expertise and the facilitation of a project like this; it's also that expert analysis that they bring to it and showing us ways to look at data and use data that we might not have considered ourselves. Working with experts from the Management School on this project has brought expertise, as you would imagine, but also, what you don't always get is the energy from these particular individuals and the fact that they're really invested in the local area. They want to understand how the theory translates into something of benefit to local people, and that's what they've really brought about with this project. The benefits I can see with working with Lancaster University Management School are the expertise, the knowledge, the connection. We're local people with local positions and we want to make a difference, but there are certain skills and expertise that we just don't have that working with the kudos of the university and the expertise gives us what we need to have a fully rounded project.

It's critical for LUMS to engage with businesses in the region and to be very much kind of part of that process as well, and I think it's especially important for us because we are part of that ecosystem and we can drive things for the businesses and take the region forward.