Consulting, knowledge transfer, impact case studies and statistics in practice

Abstract:

There is a growing interest by companies in learning more about how statistics can benefit them by analysis of their company data. This has led to a flurry of requests for consultancy work and a corresponding bottleneck of people available to do the work. Many companies value the stamp of a university and the mushrooming number of highly qualified business development staff being employed by universities are working hard to bring in more outside interest partly to achieve the impact case study requirements. This mismatch is a nuisance but doesn’t detract from the pleasure of having so many enquiries. This talk will describe some of the interesting work currently undergoing at Newcastle University with an aside about our scientific approach to preparing impact case studies.

Bio:

Shirley Coleman, PhD is Principal Statistician and Technical Director at the Industrial Statistics Research Unit, Newcastle University and a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Economics, Ljubljana University, Slovenia. She works on data analytics in SMEs and the energy sector and contributed a highly ranked impact case study to Newcastle University’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework. She is a past President of the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS), an elected member of the International Statistics Institute and a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society, leading on developing relations with Operations Research and open data. She is an active reviewer and conference organiser interested in helping to address the challenge of communication and dissemination of statistics to the wider community.