University of Edinburgh: the UK Hub for AIMday

The University of Edinburgh was the first university in the United Kingdom to organise an AIMday and has hosted hundreds of company representatives and academic researchers at numerous AIMday events since 2014. The University of Edinburgh is the UK hub for AIMday and provide the AIMday license, training, and support to other UK universities.

AIMday in the UK

UK has the greatest number of Higher Education Institutions that have organised AIMdays outside of Sweden. AIMday is a successful and proven format enabling researchers to address the challenges faced by organisations outside academia. It is a unique systematic method for research engagement that can support an institutional strategy for impact.

AIMday at University of Edinburgh

AIMday makes a unique contribution to research engagement at the University of Edinburgh and plays a central role in the engagement activities organised by Edinburgh Innovations, the University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation service. AIMday has become a well-established tool at Edinburgh, and we have been successful in using the format to drive engagement and generate impact.

We first submitted our challenge around the automation of our manufacturing processes to an AIMday just before the Covid-19 pandemic. This was cancelled, however the Covid driven increase in demand for our products made the project even more urgent. A call to the contacts at Edinburgh Innovations connected us with a research team that could help us. With the support from the University, we were able to achieve a five-fold increase in production capacity, with a system that was able to generate our disinfection solution autonomously. We’ve since expanded out our collaboration to new areas leading to Business Insider Made in Scotland awards for Manufacturer of the Year in 2021 and Best New Product 2022 for our hypochlorous hand gel developed in collaboration with the rheology team in the School of physics. Currently we have two more live projects with the university, both addressing the production of green hydrogen for the de-carbonisation of heavy transport.