Dr Clark reflects on WMG's academic and industrial collaborations:

"By dealing with people in companies [through the management education programmes], as those people got promoted or changed companies, they thought about the professionalism of WMG and how WMG could help them in other things.”

A new EPSRC-DTI joint programme, the Innovative Manufacturing Initiative, provided another springboard:

“That helped WMG hugely because these were collaborative academic-industry projects, almost a precursor to what Innovate UK and the Technology Strategy Board did later.

"So WMG was perfectly positioned to secure quite a large number of those projects, which then meant our academics had somewhere to go and somewhere to be funded from. And then you could start building the number of staff from that base.”