10:00 am - 4:00 pm 23/10/2019

The Crescent, Salford, M5 4NL

University Incubators: Building a sustainable model

Wednesday October 23rd 2019 10am – 4pm

Old Fire Station (University of Salford), The Crescent, Salford M5 4NL

** A collection of tweets from this event can be found here **

** Slides can be downloaded at the bottom of this page **

Delegates had the opportunity to:

• Hear from a range of universities that have taken different approaches to building and sustaining an incubator project
• Hear about different approaches to providing ‘wrap-around’ support to enable students and graduates to develop and grow their ventures
• Discuss their own challenges and ideas with other delegates
• Participate in an interactive workshop addressing the challenge of increasing participation with incubation projects
• Network with like-minded enterprise, entrepreneurship and incubation practitioners

Summary

This one day EEUK Enterprise Exchange event, delivered in partnership with the University of Salford and the Centre for Entrepreneurs Incubator and Accelerator Network, focused on university incubators and hot desk spaces as well as the wrap-around support and networks that are essential to create and sustain a supportive environment for students and graduates to start and grow sustainable ventures.

Universities often secure external funding to develop and launch an incubator initiative. This may be a combination of capital and revenue funding and is often sufficient to create a space and provide a rich programme of support for a limited period of time. But what happens next? Can a student incubator ever be financially sustainable and, if not, how do universities sustain incubator initiatives over the long term? And how do we increase participation in incubation activities from across the University?

Central to the questions above is the wider question of how best to support students and graduates to start and grow sustainable businesses. How do we build confidence and resilience, how do we ensure wellbeing during the stressful start-up process and how do we equip young people with the resources they need to have the best possible opportunity to start and grow an independent business that will ultimately ‘fledge’ to grow-on space?

Speakers and facilitators

• Justyna Turner, University of Salford
• Carl Thomas and Nina Lanzon, London South Bank University
• Megan Powell Vreeswijk, Nottingham Trent University
• Alex Holland, Centre for Entrepreneurs
• Louise Kenworthy, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Kiran Arokiasmy and Myrto Lalacos, Accelerate ME

Download slides here

Turner, Salford

Thomas and Lanzon, London South Bank

Powell Vreeswijk, Nottingham Trent

Kenworthy-Taylor, Manchester Met

Arokiasmy and Lalacos, Accelerate ME

Smith CfE IAN

Attendee details