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Social enterprises are considered to be ethical and responsible businesses, but how do you develop a social enterprise that is committed to inclusive governance, diversity, and equality?

Join the next Fine Tune Your Social Enterprise event to hear from experts in these areas and get inspired by social entrepreneurs who are building their businesses with fairness, inclusion, and diversity at their core.

Sessions on the day will be run by professionals who are leading the way in inclusivity and best practice. They’ll be exploring essential topics for social enterprises including Board Diversity and Ethical Supply Chains.

Agenda

9.30am Arrival

10-10.30am Intros

10.30-11.20am Session 1 – Board Diversity Lindsay Wake (SIS)

11.20-11.30am Comfort break

11.30am-12.20pm Session 2 – Ethical Supply Chain Hannah Dent (SES)

12.20-2pm Networking LUNCH

2-3.30pm Panel

• Zara Todd

• Kalpana Ratnam-Roarty

3.30-3.45pm Final remarks

4.00pm Close

Meet the speakers
Lindsay Wake

Lindsay has been Head of Impact at Social Investment Scotland since October 2019. She worked within and alongside businesses, social enterprises, community organisations and charities across Scotland, and London and the South-East for over 20 years.

Hannah Dent

Hannah is Director of Services at Social Enterprise Scotland, the national membership body for Social Enterprise. She is responsible for operational oversight, partnership development, strategic leadership, and a range of corporate support functions.

Zara Todd

Zara Todd is a disability activist, researcher, trainer and facilitator. She is setting up a social enterprise to support disabled people’s leadership in the not-for-profit sector after carrying out a Churchill Fellowship looking at inclusion, disability and leadership, and co-authoring ACEVO‘s hidden leaders report on disability leadership in the third sector.

Kalpana Ratnam-Roarty

Kalpana is the CEO of User and Carer Involvement (UCI) and a Director of Easy Read For CIC, based in Dumfries and Galloway. Over 50% of UCI’s board comprises people with learning disabilities, and Kalpana saved the charity from closure in 2019.

Places are allocated on a first come first served basis so make sure you register early to secure your place.

This event is free to attend with lunch provided.

It promises to be an engaging and reflective day.

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Knowledge Transfer Partnerships create dynamic connections between businesses and the UK’s world class knowledge bases to deliver strategic innovation projects.

The KTP Roadshow is aimed at businesses, charities, academics and researchers interested in learning more about how Knowledge Transfer Partnerships can create relationships to transfer knowledge by bringing together companies seeking knowledge and academics and researchers with knowledge.

The Building Knowledge Transfer Partnerships roadshow is an opportunity for companies to come to Queen Margaret University to meet academic and research staff and learn more about Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

The roadshow will spotlight and share insights on collaborative research and development opportunities with QMU, as well as share useful guidance on the support available from the East of Scotland KTP Centre for developing bids for government funding.

Interface is presenting at this event.

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The Bayes Centre Forum series is intended to create the opportunity for Partners & Members of the Bayes Centre, the wider University community and external business guests to interact, share experiences and explore multi-disciplinary AI and data science research collaboration opportunities.

This Bayes Forum will hear from a selection of colleagues who are focused on supporting researchers, students, staff and SMEs at all levels to take their work to industry; those that manage the programmes which support this and the researchers themselves on the importance of entrepreneurship.

Agenda:

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A chance to gain insight into how Natural Language Processing (NLP) is evolving and how various sectors are realising business benefits.

The UKRI CDT in NLP is hosting its annual Natural Language Processing Research Day in Edinburgh. This is an event for key decision makers from industry and is focused on a two-way flow of ideas to develop new collaborative opportunities that meet industry challenges.

The CDT programme is now at a stage where there is a wide mix of innovative concepts and also students at a stage where their next career choice is imminent, and we would really appreciate the chance to have industry experts share views on how such students can best prepare for this next stage in their careers and hence we invite dialogue specifically to support the student cohorts (details to follow).

Attendees will get a chance to explore strategic themes with academic research staff and postgraduate research students as well as meet with current industrial partners already immersed in the field of NLP.

The CDT is specifically designed to equip a new generation of future leaders and experts with skills for advanced research in NLP and language science, giving them foundations in: linguistics, machine learning, statistics, algorithms. programming, working with other modalities such as vision, design, ethics, and responsible innovation as they apply to NLP systems.

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Launching the new Centre for Engineering Biology at the University of Edinburgh. See the world-leading specialist research facilities including Edinburgh Genome Foundry, the world’s largest automated DNA assembly platform, and EdinOmics, for mass spectrometry, metabolomics and proteomics analysis and hear first-hand about current research and meet some of our key research staff. The morning will include short presentations on how the Centre is driving innovation in many markets including industrial biotechnology (e.g. bioremediation and biofuels), agriculture, the environment, and medicine and healthcare.

The new Centre brings together a community of more than 50 research groups and 200 researchers spanning biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, informatics, medicine and social sciences from the former Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology (SynthSys) and the UK Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology.

The event will include an opportunity to visit the world-leading Edinburgh Genome Foundry (the world’s largest and most automated platform for DNA assembly) and the EdinOmics research facility (for mass spectrometry, metabolomics and proteomics analysis). These highly specialist facilities make a significant contribution to making Scotland the go-to destination to incubate and grow bioeconomy businesses to scale. The research facilities at the University of Edinburgh are unparalleled in Scotland and we seek to constantly evolve our research environment to allow the best ideas to thrive, push frontiers, deliver economic impact and drive sustainability.

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Future economic growth could be held back because of the ‘stark regional divides’ in the UK’s technology sector, as shown by the results in the Local Digital Capital Index 2022.

techUK  is committed to developing strong local economies across our nations and regions that ensure the tech sector is at the forefront of delivering new and improved services, products, careers, companies and helping to tackle climate change. As part of techUK’s plans they are holding a number of sessions and events across the UK.

The first of these sessions will be hosted by KPMG on 2 February in Edinburgh, with Scottish Government and other stakeholders invited. We are delighted to be partnering with KPMG and to be joined by David Gimson, Director, Infrastructure, Government and Healthcare Consulting – Scotland for the discussion.

Agenda

The event will include an SME tech panel looking at the opportunities and challenges for tech firms (especially SMEs) in Scotland, and how SMEs in Scotland are helping to grow the economy, innovate and create new jobs. We’ll also discuss the impacts of the Scottish tech ecosystem, before we have a fireside chat with Mark Logan, Chief Entrepreneur to the Scottish Government. Mark is the former COO at SkyScanner, and as the Chief Entrepreneur to the Scottish Government led the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review in 2020 which aided techUK in the development of our Local Digital Capital (LDC) Index.

A great opportunity for all local stakeholders to have their say.  

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The Scottish Research Partnership in Engineering (SRPe) Annual Conference 2022.

The Scottish Research Partnership in Engineering (SRPe) Annual Conference 2022 is the annual opportunity for industry, academia and government to share the latest technological advances and research in Scotland.

Centred around SRPe’s Strategic Themes; Advanced Manufacturing; Robotics and Autonomous Systems; Engineering for Healthcare; Infrastructure & Environment, the event will take place at the John McIntyre Conference Centre in Edinburgh.

In addition to invited Keynote Speakers, there will be four Strategic Theme sessions with updates from respective Theme Chairs, and each will host a Guest Speaker with Q&A at the end of each session.

Speakers Include:

To find out more and register

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How can your clothes be the interface to a better tomorrow?

Edinburgh Futures Institute would like to invite you to consider new ways of considering the clothes you wear as a landscape for technology innovation.

From AI enabled design and co-creation, to robotic textile surfaces, data driven business models and hybrid human experiences across emergent metaverse worlds.

Our requirement to consider sustainable applications for production and consumption of clothing and its potential, leads us to create an event for the hackers, builders, entrepreneurs, material specialists, roboticists, data scientists, anthropologists and fashion experts ready to tackle some of the key challenges of innovating in the sector.

With application across business, care, manufacture, design, material innovations, circular economy, architecture and more, this event aims to collaboratively explore opportunities to re-imagine fashion and technology together at a FashionTech Gathering on 2 December 2022 at the University of Edinburgh entitled ‘Shaping the Future of Fashion’.

As the industry is considering sustainable methods of production, how to harness technology and data to improve production, distribution and customer understanding, we wish to support the journey towards solutions. We need to co-design new circular systems, develop new production methods and the talent that this future needs.

The Institute of Design Informatics recognising these challenges and skills needs is preparing to pilot new Masters opportunities in areas of Fashion Informatics, to which industry can contribute, and in the year ahead draw those skills into your company to undertake a challenge project, and a cohort you can recruit from in the near future.

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Venue: APEX City Quay Hotel, Dundee

The Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards, sponsored by Salix Finance, is the flagship event that celebrates the partnerships between business, third sector or public sector organisations and academia. Now in its eighth year the annual event recognises, rewards, and celebrates the impacts achieved through these exciting collaborations that enrich society and support sustainable and inclusive economic growth.

To discover more about the categories, and how to apply visit our recent article. Read More.