Managers of two award-winning Cornwall Innovation Centres were invited to share their expertise at a national conference held in London earlier this month.
Karen Murray, manager of the Health and Wellbeing Innovation Centre in Truro, and Richard Snell, manager of Tremough Innovation Centre in Penryn, were asked to present to a member meeting of UKSPA – the United Kingdom Science Park Association – hosted by the Imperial College Incubator in London on February 3rd and 4th.
Karen and Richard gave a presentation to delegates from science parks, business parks, universities and innovation centres based across the country and spoke about their work with the Cornwall Innovation programme run by Plymouth University, which operates three Innovation Centres in the county on behalf of Cornwall Council.
The three business acceleration facilities in Cornwall have helped the ambitious companies based there to achieve annual growth rates of up to 46 per cent – more than four times the national average.
Snell, manager of Tremough Innovation Centre, said: “Karen and I were honoured to be asked to present at the UKSPA conference, and it was a fantastic experience to take part in this event within an environment of our peers from innovation centres and science parks from across the country.
“We were invited to share best practice to our peers around the principles of business incubation, including how we select the businesses to move into our centres, the support we offer our client business, and how we help clients to move on to independent larger premises when the time is right for them to grow further.
“Karen also offered her expertise in supporting our clients with their strategic direction management. As well as presenting, we met a lot of new people at the event, picked up a connection for one of our clients from a bio tech park in Scotland, and learnt industry news.”
Since the first centre opened in Pool in 2010, the three Cornwall Innovation Centres have helped businesses based there to create more than 220 new jobs, safeguard at least a further 76, and grow revenues by more than £9.3million.
The three business acceleration centres have been ranked as amongst the best in the world by UK Business Incubation (UKBI) achieving INSPIRE accreditation, and are currently home to 140 growing companies employing around 480 people.
