• Home
• Information for participants
• Latest research findings
• Contact

Information for participants

This page provides information to participants who have been invited to contribute to the research project.

• Survey of UKDL members

Survey of UKDL members

• What are we asking you to do ?
• Why should you take the time to do this?
• What is UKDL's role in this project ?
• Will my responses be released to other parties?
• Will my personal information be kept safe?

This page will provide information for people who have been invited to participate in the survey of UKDL members.

What are we asking you to do ?

We are asking you to fill in a web-based survey. We estimate that the survey takes 10-15 minutes to fill in. You will be asked

• what types of partners would be most useful to your organisation
• whether you know certain individuals (other members of the UKDL network) who might be useful partners, and whether collaborating with them would be worthwhile
• how you make tradeoffs between different characteristics of collaborators (i.e. what is most important to you in a collaboration)

Certain organisations within the UKDL network have been identified as having particular expertise (in plastic electronics, lighting, displays, or technical or commercial consultancy) that may be useful to other members. This list, together with your answers to the early questions in the survey, will be used to identify organisations with expertise that might be useful to you. Names of people working for these organisations will be shown to you in the later part of the survey. If you work for one of these organisations, other members of the UKDL network may be asked whether it would be useful to collaborate with you.

Why should you take the time to do this?

Potential markets for applications using plastic electronics and other emerging technologies are a major opportunity for the UK. In uncertain markets requiring unproven technologies, collaborative partnerships are often useful to help address the challenges and risks associated with bringing products to market. For this reason, public funds are being invested in initiatives intended to promote collaboration, such as the Collaborative R&D Programme run by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board. Your participation in this survey will provide the following benefits:

 

• provide insight into collaboration in plastic electronics. Your combined responses to this survey provide a voice to government about the need for support for plastic electronics to ensure that the UK’s leadership in this area is secured.

• indicate how government can support collaboration. The insights will be communicated to government (the Technology Strategy Board and DIUS in particular), in order to demonstrate how innovation in emerging technologies can be best supported

• reveal the value of formal networks such as KTNs. UKDL is supporting this project because it hopes to find out whether active involvement in the network increases the chances of finding research partners efficiently, and whether there are barriers to forming partnerships that the network could try to help overcome.

/\ Top

What is UKDL's role in this project?

UKDL is providing access to its membership, but is not involved in collecting or analysing data from the survey. UKDL will not have access to individual responses to any of the questions.

/\ Top

Will my responses be released to other parties ?

All information collected by this questionnaire will be strictly confidential and used only for research purposes. Individual answers will not be made available to any member of the UKDL network (where the network includes the Committees, Steering Group and Advisory board), to anyone from DIUS, BERR or the Technology Strategy Board, or to any other third party in any form whereby individual responses could be identifiable. 

 

In publishing the findings of the research, all data you enter will be represented in aggregated form. Your individual responses will not be identifiable.

 

/\ Top

Will my personal information be kept safe?

The University of Reading is registered under the Data Protection Act 1998. Consequently, personal data collected within this research project will be processed in accordance with this act and with the University's Data Protection Policy. All information collected within this project will be strictly confidential and used only for research purposes. Names and contact details will be held separately from other data collected through the questionnaire.

 

The data you enter into the web-based survey will be stored into a database held on a secure server. Initially this will be an external server belonging to a professional hosting company, at a level of security deemed appropriate for a secure e-commerce site. Once the questionnaire is complete, the data will be moved to a secure University of Reading machine.  Only the researchers on this project will be able to access the data, and they will work in accordance with the University’s Data Protection Policy and the Data Protection Act.

 

Data will be used for the analysis of various research questions over the next two years. The project may be extended for a longer period, and a dataset generated by the researchers may be deposited in a data archive to permit access by other researchers. In this instance all data will be rendered anonymous; no individuals or companies will be identifiable.

/\ Top