Summary
UK universities are having to come to terms with the double whammy of a 2010 Spending Review that will see budgets reduced from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014, and the Browne Review of higher education funding and student finance, which argues that those who benefit (i.e. students) should make a far greater contribution to the cost than is currently required. Against this backdrop the authors seek to contribute to the graduate skills debate. They will demonstrate that delivering employment-ready graduates ignores the demands of a radically altered world of work in the face of the government’s response to the latest economic crisis. While its primary focus is on the supply side (graduates) the authors are cognisant of the market research industry, which itself is facing external pressures to shift from a milieu of data gathering to a future of intelligent insight providers. We then go on to present the development of a new type of university, which has actively sought to reduce its dependency on traditional funding sources. Finally, we present a model of a research facility at one university that has successfully engaged with the local and regional business community to the benefit of its student workforce. In doing so, it has helped to develop over 70 graduate researchers, with entrepreneurial mindsets, who have all gone on to secure enterprising futures.

Summary
Customer satisfaction is an important objective in all areas of business and services. A key issue in today's design activities is to achieve customer satisfaction in an economical way by finding the attributes that are most valuable to customers. In this paper we propose a formal and efficient methodology to design a new service, which is an improvement on a platform service. We propose a methodology to link two tools - the statistical design of experiments (SDE), for data collection, and quality function deployment (QFD), for the development of conceptual alternatives. The focus is only on functional dimensions, but it can be used in symbolic and aesthetic dimensions. The study uses a recent survey on the development of an operations management course curriculum to illustrate the conjoint methodology.