As much as Universities love to work externally and develop exciting new research and relationships, the simple fact is that they generally don’t (can’t, won’t) do things for free. This sometimes comes as a surprise to companies when I first have conversations with them.
The job of any good business development bod at a Uni is to find a way to enable a company to access the expertise they need within the Uni by finding some funding to do the work. This might be an innovation voucher, the company paying for a small piece of consultancy, or through collaboratively applying for some funding through (eg.) Innovate UK competitions.
And one of those competitions is the KTP strand.
No 2 KTPs cost exactly the same, but they have the same cost structure and usually fall within a clear range. The costs are:
- Associate Salary – capped at £58,000 p/a for Associates based 16 miles from Charing Cross (this includes University on-costs, the NI and pension contribution made on top of the annual salary – so gross salary for the Associate is around £40k).
- Associate Development – this is money that is dedicated to the development of the Associate, so they can attend training, get relevant qualifications etc. £2,000 p/a.
- Consumables – capped at £2,000 p/a, this is for equipment that is essential to deliver the project such as a laptop for the Associate or laboratory equipment. Software costs are not allowed.
- T&S – capped at £1,250 p/a. This is for the academics to visit the company to hold the F2F supervision and project meetings, and for the Associate to visit the University to attend training or use lab facilities.
- Academic wage – this is variable but calculated as a total of 10% of academic time for the duration of the project. This 10% can be split between both the Lead and the Supervisor, or just be allocated to the Supervisor.
- Additional Associate Support – also variable, this covers the costs of the University’s involvement in the project and is usually worked out as a % of the total salary costs.
Rough estimates would be a total cost of between £80,000-£110,000 p/a for a KTP, and the company contribution depends on their size (50% for large and public sector, 33% for SMEs, 25% for charities and NFPs).
So for an SME this means an annual cost of between £26,000 to £36,000.
It’s important to be clear about these costs from the start of the conversation – for SMEs in particular this is a big investment and can be off-putting. The way I normally frame this is comparing how much delivering the project would cost in other ways…..
These are strategic, really challenging and important projects that will deliver real value to the commercial partner – either commercial or organisational. If you went out to recruit directly you would be looking at salaries in the range of maybe £50-60,ooo p/a. Or you could get the job done through consultants, and then you would be looking at adding at least one zero to the end of that figure……
In this respect KTPs can be a cost-effective way of achieving your ambitions.