T he Institute is pleased to announced two programmes will receive a total of £40,000 to deliver programmes of enquiry and knowledge exchange, host invited international participants and promote third sector involvement .

The Programmes were assessed and selected by senior academics from a number of Scottish universities and will run during the six months from October 2011.

The successful programmes are:

-Building Safer Communities: Developing Coordinated Approaches to Investigating and Preventing Fires.

The Investigation of origin, cause and development of fires is a critical issue for the design and development of a safer built environment, in understanding how people behave when confronted with a fire and in being able to develop appropriate fire investigation skills which will provide a service to the criminal and civil courts. The development of a collective strategic approach to fire incident resolution across the stakeholder communities and the cross fertilisation of industrial and academic research facilitated by interaction and agreement of common goals will be an enormous benefit which we aim to achieve from the SUII sponsored events. Three two day workshops addressing critical and interlinked themes will be held at SUII during the program covering

• Fire scene investigation and the development of a multidisciplinary approach.
• Critical issues in the investigation of fatal fires
• Building better investigative teams : training, knowledge transfer and assessment of competence in fire investigation

Programme team: Prof. Niamh Nic Daeid (University of Strathclyde); Prof. Sue Black (University of Dundee); Gary Holcroft (Scottish Police Services Authority Forensic Services).

-Developing Capacity in Technology RoadMapping (TRM): Research, Business Practice and Policy for Scotland. Technology Road Mapping (TRM) is a framework and technique to scope out future landscapes in science and technology, given objectives such as product or service development, strategic R&D management, and social or industrial policy development. TRM emerged as a set of diverse industry practices, which academics gathered, collated and systematized in the early 2000s, and continue to do so. Our programme aims to enhance the capacity in Scotland for undertaking TRM, in: academic research and knowledge exchange; business practice (with a particular focus on SMEs); and policy, both as a user and diffuser of TRM.  Our SUII programme’s objectives include, to:

• Capture state of the art knowledge about TRM among internationally recognised researchers in science, technology and innovation studies, and in strategy practices.
• Capture and contrast expert practices in TRM among large companies and SMEs, compared with other analytical practices in support of decision-making, and across different industry sectors important to the Scottish economy, assessing the extent to which practices can be made generic.
• Appraising the uses of TRM in policy, as practiced in decisions making, as libraries, and as practices to be diffused.

TRM has recently become a common term, yet its practices vary widely, which is important as companies need to coordinate their activities and investments with one another and/or with governments locally and internationally. The proposals’ greatest scope for impact in Scotland is in diffusing technology strategy practices among companies, and influencing policy-makers in their uses of TRM, to publish roadmaps, and establishing training. We will address the following questions:

• What counts as best practice in TRM, and how does TRM compare with other frameworks, tools and techniques in supporting strategic decisions?
• How do practices in TRM vary with respect to: company size, industry sectors (including proximate ones connected in supply, or as customers), and exporting intensity?
• In policy terms, how can TRM as a social-technical-economic process establish consensus, and what are the qualities of such consensus in scope and durability?

Programme team: Prof. John Finch (University of Strathclyde); Dr Raluca Bunduchi (University of Aberdeen); Mr Scott Wilson (Scottish Enterprise); Prof. Paul Mitchell (University of Aberdeen).