The grant will support a two-year partnership between Edge Hill’s business analysis experts and fabrics manufacturer Panaz, a global leader in producing high quality, technical fabrics and wallcoverings for the Hospitality, Healthcare, and corporate sectors.
The University will help Panaz transform and expand their management capabilities to maximise new and existing business opportunities in the UK and Internationally.
Professor Simon Bolton, Professor of Innovation and Director of the SME PIC, will take on the role as Knowledge Base Lead for the duration of the partnership, he said: “We first worked with Panaz in 2019 through our Rapid Innovation Sprint Programme and we have established a great understanding of their strategic objectives and the complex environment in which they operate. The KTP provides a great opportunity to continue to improve the strategic and operational capabilities of the organisation through the analysis of their sales and performance data, to ultimately stimulate further growth.
“The new project is a great addition to Edge Hill’s growing KTP portfolio and valuable learnings from the project will inform the research and teaching of our academic business experts.”
The partnership between the University and Panaz will employ a high-calibre Business Management graduate to work on the project. The Graduate Associate will play an integral role in ensuring the project’s successful implementation and will be based full-time at Panaz.
The project is all part of Innovate UK’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme, which is designed to enable transformational improvement by identifying key strategic, management-based initiatives to increase business productivity.
Rollie Attard, Chief Operating Officer at Panaz said: “This is a fantastic collaboration allowing the business to further innovate through the exploration of white space and data connectivity within the area of textiles.
This will go a long way in helping us understand our customers better so that we can serve them better”.
More information about Edge Hill University’s sector leading SME PIC can be found on its webpage.
To discover more about courses at Edge Hill, please visit ehu.ac.uk/study.
October 4, 2022
