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A residential workshop for PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) with an interest in interdisciplinarity and the commercialisation of research.

Ketso is an interactive, hands-on toolkit for bringing meetings and workshops to life. It is compact and portable, simple to use and accessible to everyone. Ketso extends people's ability to run effective and enjoyable workshops - virtually anywhere and in any setting. It encourages people to be creative and share in productive dialogue, while also generating real results that can be put into action. Ketso provides a set of tabletop tools that can be used to capture and display people's ideas. It consists of colourful 'branches', 'leaves' and other materials, which can be placed on a felt workspace and easily moved around in response to changing discussion. Ketso is robust and portable, and comes in a handy carrying bag, making it easy to transport to and from events. Ketso provides a series of free resources to help you run effective workshops and engagement processes - such as workshop plans and training videos in planning and running a workshop.

The Social Media sessions demonstrated a successful integration of a student-led initiative within a formal graduate training provision. The initiative underlined the importance of engaging PhD students in their own learning and training needs, in both sharing expertise with peers and in contributing to their own professional development. In doing so, it demonstrated to other postgraduate researchers how they might utilise their own areas of expertise to develop further student-led initiatives.

Three-day business plan competition for researchers to produce a business plan for an imaginary start-up company, engineering-based.

The Jubilee Graduate Centre (JGC) has been exclusively developed for postgraduate students and early career researchers. It works closely with Schools on the Jubilee Campus to develop Faculty-specific training and careers events for PGRs/ECRs focusing on transferable skills, and which reflect the requirements of the Funding Councils.

Durham University Graduate School fund up to three one-year Business Creation Fellowships per year. These fellowships, which provide a small stipend to support the Fellow, are designed to enable Fellows to develop a very early stage business idea towards market. The business idea need not be related to the Fellow’s previous research interests. Applicants should have a potentially viable business idea that is capable of being taken to market. There is no restriction on the stage that the business is at, although it is anticipated that these will be at a very early stage. Fellows will be given a stipend of £10,000 to cover their living expenses for the duration of the fellowship, so enabling them to concentrate on developing their business idea. Fellows will be given access to the Business Incubator and support will be offered by the Technology Transfer and Postgraduate Training Team. Candidates for the Fellowships should be either: (i) Postgraduate research students of Durham University in the final stages of completing their research degree OR (ii) Postdoctoral researchers at Durham University whose contract of employment is close to termination. The Fellowship will be tenable for 1 year from 1st October or a mutually agreed date. However, Fellows who are postgraduate research students will normally have had to submit their thesis before taking up their Fellowship, while postdoctoral researchers will normally have terminated their employment with the University before taking up their Fellowship. The principal duty of the Business Creation Fellow is to develop their business idea. To support this, Fellows will be asked to undertake a training needs analysis at the commencement of their Fellowship and then address their training needs, supported by the Postgraduate Training Team and the Tech Transfer Office. Fellows will also have to undertake enterprise support work from time to time, amounting to, on average, no more than half a day per week. Applications Deadline: mid July. Candidates should include a brief business-focussed CV, a short (1 page) outline of their business idea and an outline of their plans for progressing the idea over the period of the Fellowship (1 page). If a business plan is available this should be included; if a business plan has not yet been written candidates should include descriptions of • Intellectual property protection • Potential markets • Potential competitors • How you will reach your customers and make money Informal enquiries may me made to the director of postgraduate training.

This is a student led project which aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss the use of new media technologies.