Leading Business Development

Members of the SETsquared Partnership Business Acceleration Centres met at Southampton Science Park in April to share best practice and develop new ideas for its cutting-edge business support concepts.

SETsquared was launched in 2002 as a partnership between the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Southampton and Surrey with the aim of delivering incubation programmes to high growth potential start-up companies. It has since expanded with new partners Exeter and Cardiff Universities, and by offering a wider range of entrepreneurial support from student enterprise to open innovation with large companies, and ICURe, aimed at helping academics evaluate business ideas.

Each of the SETsquared partner universities has a Business Acceleration Centre, offering high quality facilities to host incubation programmes, such as Southampton Science Park’s Catalyst which is offered to entrepreneurial start-ups.

David Bream, Director - SETsquared Programme at Southampton, said: “While the move to online collaboration worked remarkably well given the circumstances of the last couple of years, this coming together of the people behind our Business Acceleration Centres marked an important transition back to face-to-face meetings.

“It couldn’t have come at a better time. With Covid-19 experiences fresh in our minds, the meeting highlighted the significant opportunities that have opened up around delivering best practice business support in a post-lockdown world where we can retain the best remote working practices and also rediscover the energy and creativity that arise from getting together. Embracing these opportunities will keep SETsquared at the cutting edge of business incubation thinking and practice, keep us innovating, challenging ourselves and improving our outcomes for the businesses we support.”

Find out more about SETsquared and Catalyst business support programmes at the University of Southampton Science Park.