Consultancy and research
Work with our staff and students on research and consultancy projects.
Your organisation benefits from academic insights, while we gain important data, combining theoretical approaches with real-world challenges.
Businesses, charities and public sector organisations have worked with us to develop valuable data, potential scenarios, plans, recommendations, and more.
Business advisors
We offer free and unbiased help and advice to support your organisation. We welcome informal, confidential conversations to offer comment, test out ideas, draw on examples and case studies, and create network links. We can help to identify where challenges or opportunities could arise.
Consultancy
Engage our academic experts to address short- to medium-term organisational challenges and opportunities. We have worked with numerous businesses, public sector and third sector organisations to help frame problems, co-deliver solutions and support implementation of change.
Business consultancy projects
Set-up: November to December
Project start: January
Delivery: March
Our undergraduate students deliver a six-week part-time consultancy assignment in groups for individual clients on a project specified by you.
We have impressive feedback from our clients each year. Examples of previous consultancy projects include:
- Development of an ethical policy template for a large food manufacturer
- Devising a strategy for boosting visitor numbers at a national charity’s site in York
- Researching the market demand and consumer profile for a small cosmetics company
Research dissertations
Set-up: January to March
Project start: May
Delivery: August
Our postgraduate students engage in four months of full-time research on a challenging investigative area.
We regularly work with organisations to align these research dissertations to business needs. Your organisation gets interesting research and students benefit from working on a live project.
Examples of previous research dissertations include:
- Customers' motivations for charitable giving for a national retail company
- Millennials' changing customer values for a regional service company
Collaborative research and development projects
Work with academic experts on a long-term challenge your organisation faces. We place a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research that engages with current key debates in policy, business and society. In addition, we seek to gain impact by deploying our knowledge in organisations.
Professor Bob Doherty speaks at the Coop's Future of Food launch.
Explore our impact
We value the impact of our research on business, third sector, policy and communities generally. Our staff are motivated by seeing the wider application of their work, and it's a key metric for the external assessment of our research quality.
We always have many projects under way, and these are driven by the expertise of our staff and our three subject groups. The projects we highlight here illustrate the impact of our research outside academia.
IKnowFood
We're working with industry, NGOs and the policy community to help ensure sustainable food supply systems.
Changing shifts
We're helping a large NHS mental health trust understand the impact of moving to new working patterns.
LGBT+ employee networks
By better understanding staff networks, we aim to create more inclusive environments.