OCC designed a web-fronted database to help academics and businesses work more effectively together. It has been developed as part for the Government's Business Support Programme.

A key part of the Government's programme is to increase UK productivity by funding business support programmes for Technology and Innovation, Access to Finance and Best Business Practice, Regional investment. Support is included for R&D, and Knowledge transfer partnership itself.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) benefits British businesses and knowledge bases (universities, research institutions and colleges) by:

• Assigning a KTP associate (a graduate) to work with a partnership business for 1-3 years on an agreed project, whilst still under the supervision of the knowledge base. This ensures fresh research knowledge is transferred into the business, increasing its producitivity and competitiveness.
• Providing graduates with experience as well as academic courses which can lead to qualifications such as NVQ in management. 

Dave Pippard, Technology Transfer & Innovation's Managing Director, asked OCC to become the company's IT partner for the KTP product.  As Mr. Pippard explains,

“We needed a web-fronted database that could be accessed by academics, businesses, government stakeholders and the public. Authorised partners need to enter live data via the website, which passes through to a secure database for analysis and report generation.  Automated emailing assigns tasks to associates, and tracked by all those involved in a specific project."

The database synchronises with the master KTP database automatically every night so that information is fresh and, very importantly, backed up. OCC’s sister company, Oxford Internet Consultants (Oxinet) developed the web and automatic emailing aspects of the system hosts the system on their Oxford-based server farm and continues to support the system.  The initial KTP project was completed within six months.  Dr. Reynold Greenlaw, Senior Consultant at OCC, in charge of future support for the KTP system, advises: