How the Corporate Partnership Programme Works

The primary aim of the Corporate Partnership Programme is to provide a straightforward and effective way for businesses to work with the College and the University and to access its network of 'hidden' intelligence. Hence the College uses its resources and expertise:

• to identify opportunities for collaboration
• to design, set up and manage a tailored programme for each partner
• to locate academic specialists within the University
• to ensure that agreed objectives are met

This is achieved by developing a relatively small number of intensive relationships with leading UK and international companies. There are currently seven corporate partners at the William Pitt level, ranging in size from a company with fewer than twenty employees which develops automated x-ray inspection technologies, to a major international ICT business with more than 100,000 staff.

Businesses are able to join the Corporate Partnership Programme at one of two levels. Companies who join at the William Pitt level recognise the benefits associated with maintaining a longer-term partnership with the College and typically join the programme for a five-year term. They have full access to all the activities associated with the programme. This includes discounted rates for running seminars and workshops, free use of College rooms, a dedicated Pembroke Fellow who acts as a key academic interface with the company, and support from a dedicated Corporate Team. Organisations joining at this higher level are invited to nominate a senior executive to be elected as a William Pitt Fellow at Pembroke College.

In response to demand for other opportunities to provide benefit for companies, the College has implemented a new, introductory, tier of membership. At this level, the term of engagement is negotiable but will typically be for no more than three years in the first instance. These partners will still receive full support from the Corporate Team. However, they will be charged at commercial rates for organising events such as seminars, using Pembroke rooms for holding management team meetings, etc. Businesses who join at this level do not have the option to nominate a member of senior management as a William Pitt Fellow.

It is anticipated that organisations who join initially at the lower introductory tier will recognise the benefits of transferring to the higher William Pitt level of partnership after one or two years.

The Corporate Partnership Programme works successfully because:

• it offers access to senior figures and key thinkers across the University via the College Fellowship, which spans (virtually) the entire range of subject areas covered by the University.
• the College provides an intimate and welcoming atmosphere on which many visitors remark.
• it has a thirteen-year track record of success - unmatched across Cambridge - which has included funding (by corporate partners) of research posts in various departments across Cambridge, covering areas such as biotechnology, IT and genomics, health economics, molecular informatics, mass spectrometry, sustainable development and, most recently, systems biology. In many cases, it has been possible to offer College Fellowships to post holders where they are able to provide teaching capability in subjects where the College has an unfulfilled need.
• we are able to host seminars and workshops for our Corporate Partners; typically these will involve academics from Cambridge, often supplemented by individual experts from other universities, research organisations or businesses, or may be run entirely by the companies.

The examples below illustrate some of the outcomes that have emerged as successful relationships have been forged between Pembroke College and its corporate partners

• Seminars and workshops
• Management courses
• Lectures
• Summer placements
• BT Senior Scholarships

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SEMINARS

Seminars have been arranged on a wide range of subjects, including:

• Biomedical Sciences
• Stem Cell Research
• Imaging of receptor biology on tissues
• Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
• Strategy planning
• Drug craving
• Globalisation

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COURSES

Working with the Judge Business School, Pembroke has helped to initiate a series of seminars on Lean Thinking, for Xchanging, a series of management seminars for Anglian Water, and high-level management courses for BT client programmes.

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LECTURES

Lectures that have been presented include:

The William Pitt Seminar series

• 2006 - Collaboration between Academia and Industry : David Cleevely, Chairman, Communications Research Network
• 2007 - Climate Change: Approaches to its consequences and challenges
• 2008 - Narratives of Risk
• 2009 - A Blueprint for Survival
• 2010 - Geopolitics: crisis and change
• 2011 - The Future of the World in Four Objects

The Xchanging German Xcellence Lecture series

Xchanging is supporting a five-year annual German Lecture series, which commenced in October 2008. These are jointly organised by Pembroke College, the Department of German and Dutch, and the Judge Business School, with a focus on the intersection between German cultural themes and business.

• 2008 - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Academy Award winning director of The Lives of Others (2006)
• 2009 - Dr Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State

The Pembroke-BT Lecture Series

• 2008 - Jeff Patmore, Head of Strategic University Research, BT Innovate
• 2009 - Matt Bross, Chief Technology Officer, BT Group.
• 2010 - Ivan Boyd, Head of Business Engagement and Operations, BT Innovation and Design
• 2011 - Sir Michael Rake, Chariman, BT Group

Other lectures:

On-Line Social Networking: what does this mean for big businesses? was a talk given by Jeff Patmore, Head of Strategic University Research, BT Innovate.

David Andrews, CEO of Xchanging addressed MBA students at the Judge Business School on What is Business Process Outsourcing?

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SUMMER PLACEMENTS

Partners often offer summer placements to students, with BT doing so every year, giving them the opportunity to experience working life within a successful company.

Nick Stenning (2007)

Pembroke undergraduate, Nick Stenning, an Engineering student, has now completed two summer placements, arranged through the Corporate Partnership; in 2009 he spent his summer working for Cheyney Group, before spending this summer with BT at Adastral Park. His report of his two summers is below:

"One, a tiny electronics design firm with just four full-time employees. The other, the oldest telecommunications company in the world with slightly more than 100,000 staff on its payroll. These have been my hosts for internships this year and last. Despite the vast differences between Cheyney Design and Development (based in Royston) on the one hand and BT (at Adastral Park, near Ipswich) on the other, both have been excellent temporary homes for a physicist looking for a challenge. Luckily for me, both are Pembroke Corporate Partners.

Cheyney is a small but overwhelmingly successful electronics design firm, specialising in automatic vision systems. They design and occasionally build X-ray scanners for the food and pharmaceutical industries (among others) and compete with companies hundreds of times their size. Richard Parmee, a Pembroke graduate and the wind behind the company's sails, is nothing short of a mad genius. Combining an alliance of small partner companies with Cheyney's technically superior products (one wonders if the competitors' engineers were from The Other Place?), he has produced a remarkably profitable business. The result is a working environment in which mistakes are an opportunity for experiment, ignorance for learning, and lazy Friday afternoons are filled with philosophy rather than timesheets. Lucky for me, really, as I make many ignorant mistakes. I don't wear a watch, either.

I spent eight weeks at Cheyney last year, pulling myself up by my bootstraps as a software engineer trying to teach himself about hardware. I learnt an enormous amount about electronics, but also about business pragmatism, and what a really productive office environment looks like. I might even have learnt (through my own mistakes) that Keep It Simple Stupid really is more than a silly acronym.

BT has a rather different business model. Even after seven weeks at Adastral Park, the home of BT's Innovate and Design arm, I have only a hazy concept of the company's organisational structure. Nonetheless, I found myself in a small group in BT Research working on an innovative data visualisation tool -- the only jeans and t-shirts on a floor of suits. Considering the size of its parent organisations, BT Research provides a refreshing small-company ethos. Certainly, Adastral Park has fewer full-height glass windows and Aeron chairs than your average SoCal startup office, but with goal-directed working and management that is supportive, interested but not intrusive, working there is good for the soul.

Working at BT also gave me the opportunity to meet a battery of interesting people through Pembroke's contact there, Jeff Patmore. I went with Jeff to BT Centre, a stone's throw from St Paul's Cathedral. By the end of one busy morning, I'd been on a teleconference to BT’s Beijing office, chatting with a scientific advisor to the Chinese government, met the head of BT India, and then had lunch at the Royal Society of Arts off the Strand where Jeff is a Fellow.

I've been enormously lucky to be presented with the opportunities to work at these very different companies, and am under no illusions that I have Pembroke staff to thank. For a college to show such conscientiousness in its dealings with undergraduates is rare, and it is, I think, the key to Pembroke's success as a college of happy and satisfied young men and women."

Diana Zinchenko, Murray Edwards College

Diana had completed her first year as a Maths student when she went to spend the summer of 2010 with BT at Adastral Park. She has now changed to studying Economics.

"This summer I’ve spent ten weeks working in the research division at BT (BT Innovate and Design). There are very few internship opportunities available for undergraduates after their first year of study, so it was with much enthusiasm that I followed the advice of the careers advisor and got in touch with Geoff Hale at Pembroke College about an internship at BT. It turned out to be an excellent recommendation. Then I met with Jeff Patmore, Head of Strategic University Research at BT Group, who envisaged the whole internship and tailored it to my strengths and interests. After a couple of interviews, I was delighted to have been offered the opportunity to work in the research division at BT and especially in the Future Content Group. There is something mysterious about doing research on the future and I was very excited to begin the placement.

On the first day I found that my project was going to be on the intersection between personalisation and Social TV, both of great interest to BT and of which I had but a vague knowledge to start with. It is with great thanks that I think of my managers, who looked after me throughout the internship and particularly in the first few weeks when I was getting to grips with the recommender algorithms and the ideas behind Social TV. The more academic papers I read and the more I learned from everyone in the team, the more I realised just how closely the project matched my interests.

Speaking with Jeff Patmore I mentioned that I liked maths, not surprisingly since I had just finished my first year of the Maths Tripos, and that I was also interested in how people interact with technology. This is precisely the combination that I got! Recommender systems consist of algorithms that look at what people bought in the past and attempt to make personalised recommendations of what they might like to buy in the future. This is not a simple task and requires analysis of large amounts of data. Current algorithms however are not very effective at predicting our future needs. If you ever bought an unusual gift for a friend you might still be surprised to receive recommendations of similar items long after the purchase. So, in the first part of the internship I worked on improving the accuracy of recommendations, in particular how the person’s environment and personality might affect their choice of products and how this can be incorporated into an algorithm.

A natural way to get recommendations is to ask friends and social networks for advice. In particular, the concept of Social TV is looking at how people might be able to recommend TV programmes and films to each other, share opinions and even create their own TV content. To investigate how people respond to watching the same programme simultaneously in different locations, I organised user experience tests in the specially built rooms that look like typical living rooms, just with much more technology in the background. Thanks to everyone in the team the technology in the test was working smoothly. My task was to recruit the participants, ensure that the concept test makes sense and that we would get useful data, and, no pressure, to co-ordinate the tests on the day. There were several surprising results and I was glad to learn the beginnings of ground theory to analyse the data. Amongst other things, people tended to communicate more with each other using video, audio and text communications when they were in different rooms, than when they were all together in the same room! Some programmes generated a good deal of discussion, while others, such as comedy shows, generated lots of laughter, but surprisingly few comments. All this can be used to analyse to potential of Social TV for different contents, occasions, groups. We also got useful feedback on how to streamline the technical set up for the future tests. The crisis of choice became apparent: when there are many TV programmes available, it can be a challenge to choose what to watch and this reinforces the need for accurate recommender algorithms that I worked on at the beginning of the placement.

The summer internship at BT has been a one of a kind experience. With an interesting project, supportive team, the chance to meet with really inspirational people, it’s no wonder that the ten weeks flew by very quickly and I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned and developed as a person in that time. Many thanks to everyone I’ve worked with for their patience, time and good humour and for making the internship happen."

Tim Funnell (2004), a pharmacology student, writes about his summer placement with UCB-Celltech:

"With more and more people going to university, it is becoming increasingly difficult to woo prospective employers or academic institutions with a mere undergraduate degree; in the sciences especially additional experience and ‘labwork’ is immensely valuable. I was lucky enough to be offered a three-month industrial placement with UCB, a corporate partner of Pembroke College, and a global leader in biopharma specialising in inflammation and oncology treatments.

The head of research and development at UCB, Dr Melanie Lee is a William Pitt Fellow of Pembroke and she gave a talk to the current students, I took an interest in the work being conducted in the Cambridge laboratories of the company and contacted Dr Lee regarding feasibility of doing a placement; she very promptly replied and kindly put me in touch with the relevant people. After a series of interviews discussing ideas that would benefit both the company’s research, and my own interests, I was offered a placement for the entire summer, with a stipend to cover my living costs.

I had a superb time, working with some terrific people. Not only did I learn a great deal that helped me in my degree and later work, we managed to produce some useful data towards the projects I was working on. The benefits were not just academic improvement, I found that my time at UCB really helped me understand how science can be applied commercially, how drug companies prioritise their work and the economics involved.

This placement was a great opportunity for me and I am so grateful for Dr Lee and the Pembroke Development Office for establishing that initial link. I would hope more companies might consider offering placements and that Pembroke can provide able and willing students that can contribute positively to any schemes offered."

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BT SENIOR SCHOLARSHIPS

BT´s Senior Scholarship is a programme that offers a great opportunity for students to broaden their horizons and improve crucial skills in business communication and networking as well as improving their knowledge of industry and research applications.

The Scholarship offers 12 days engagement with BT over one year with a value of £2000. The student has £1000 to spend on attending conferences or visiting other centres of direct benefit to their studies; the student´s Department receives £500 to spend on resources for the support of other students and BT pays up to £500 for travel and accommodation associated with the 12 days spent at the company´s premises. BT enjoys dedicated interaction with the student - and often their supervisor too - while the student benefits from close engagement in a commercial setting.

Malia Kilpinen (2004), a graduate working at the Engineering Design Centre and the first the first Pembroke student to be awarded a BT Senior Scholarship, said “The scholarship allowed me to spend a week with a design team, interview designers for an empirical study part of my PhD research project, participate in a design workshop (HotHouse), and talk with high school students as part of BT's science ambassador scheme. I believe BT benefited from the interaction through a report I wrote about potential improvements to the HotHouse process, and more generally through the exchange of ideas during the interview sessions. In turn, my PhD research project directly benefited through extending my empirical studies and being able to publish 2 conference papers. It was also useful for me to see my research into agile software development applied within BT and illuminated other areas for further research, which I initially did not find in literature or previous empirical studies.

Furthermore, I enjoyed learning and being exposed to the telecom industry, which I find very dynamic.”

Mark Mann (1999) who studied for his PhD at the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics and held a scholarship from 2006-2007, said of his scholarship year "The BT Scholarship has helped in many ways. It has given me financial support to go to conferences I otherwise would have not been able to go to. It has given me the opportunity to see how a large company functions and how ideas become prototypes and then products (which is of particular interest to me as I have a working prototype myself). Because BT is a large company, any scholar is able to get involved with activities related to their discipline. BT has been completely open to me and I have consequently been able to meet and get involved with many parts of its operation...in applying myself to tasks that I would not ordinarily have done, I have moved out of my comfort zone as part of this scholarship. Consequently, I have a much better appreciation of my strengths and weaknesses and I have learnt a lot more about myself. I have certainly gained a lot from this experience. It has been a successful 12 months, and I hope BT has gained something from my input too."

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