Oxford U Teams with Ideate on Research Management Apps

Oxford University said it will be working with a new research management framework developed by Ideate. Oxford selected the company as its development partner to build a budgeting tool called the Costing and Pricing System, a successor to Resolve, a 20-year old legacy desktop application. The application will be rolled out university-wide.

According to Glenn Swafford, director of Research Services at Oxford, the system will be used to cost and price all research proposals involving grants and contracts to help his division calculate the full economic cost of each proposal. Full economic costing is a nationally required method of identifying true costs of a project for the Research Councils UK. The latter is a consortium of research councils intended to help them work together more effectively to enhance the overall impact and effectiveness of their research, training, and innovation activities. As a group, the seven members invest around £2.8 billion in research in the United Kingdom.

"The proof-of-concept work we did with Ideate has given us a lot of confidence that we can develop a system to meet the needs of Oxford's researchers and research administrators," said Swafford. "This will give us the opportunity to use state of the art technology, build live links with our finance and [human resources] systems, and meet new business requirements." If the technical evaluation continues to go well, he said, the university hopes to have the new system in place within 12 months of the start of the development process.

"Historically, the niche arena of research management has been under-served by software solutions due to the complexities of the research lifecycle," said company founder, Dave Duggal, in an e-mail. "Our company leverages modern Web 2.0 technologies and a patent pending service oriented framework (the first such platform in research administration) to deliver highly responsive and uniquely adaptable software applications, and addresses some of the fundamental underlying information architecture issues, while providing a compelling and intuitive user experience. Ideate is Research 2.0."

Ideate has adopted a cell-phone type subscription model, "that mitigates risk for research institutions by allowing them to flexibly scale their use up or down based on success and actual use--right sizing their investment as they go," Duggal said. Prices are based on blocks of 100 users. He said a 100-user multi-year account that includes unlimited use of all applications would be about $35,000 a year, including application maintenance, upgrades, and access to new applications. A larger institution with over 1,000 users on a multi-year account would be about $250,000 per year.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • abstract illustration of a glowing AI-themed bar graph on a dark digital background with circuit patterns

    Stanford 2025 AI Index Reveals Surge in Adoption, Investment, and Global Impact as Trust and Regulation Lag Behind

    Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has released its AI Index Report 2025, measuring AI's diverse impacts over the past year.

  • modern college building with circuit and brain motifs

    Anthropic Launches Claude for Education

    Anthropic has announced a version of its Claude AI assistant tailored for higher education institutions. Claude for Education "gives academic institutions secure, reliable AI access for their entire community," the company said, to enable colleges and universities to develop and implement AI-enabled approaches across teaching, learning, and administration.

  • lightbulb

    Call for Speakers Now Open for Tech Tactics in Education: Overcoming Roadblocks to Innovation

    The annual virtual conference from the producers of Campus Technology and THE Journal will return on September 25, 2025, with a focus on emerging trends in cybersecurity, data privacy, AI implementation, IT leadership, building resilience, and more.

  • From Fire TV to Signage Stick: University of Utah's Digital Signage Evolution

    Jake Sorensen, who oversees sponsorship and advertising and Student Media in Auxiliary Business Development at the University of Utah, has navigated the digital signage landscape for nearly 15 years. He was managing hundreds of devices on campus that were incompatible with digital signage requirements and needed a solution that was reliable and lowered labor costs. The Amazon Signage Stick, specifically engineered for digital signage applications, gave him the stability and design functionality the University of Utah needed, along with the assurance of long-term support.