New support for startups and scaleups in East London
ENTIQ’s new innovation centre in the old Olympic Park will be a great new signpost but the peloton needs more than that: a new network is needed to spur incubators and co-working spaces to develop support services like this one –  for the growing number of young businesses.

ENTIQ is the innovation consultancy behind a new Innovation Centre on the new campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London. Jointly owned with an investment fund, it will provide support services for business development for: new product development – with prototyping facilities and a technology lab, entrepreneurship and business education, business-accelerator and -growth programmes, and back office and professional support.

                                                          Focus on local threads 

The Innovation Centre’s aim is to establish a cluster of up to 500 members and organisations as at Tech City in Shoreditch; and the Centre will work with companies big and small that are pioneering new technology in their fields, with an initial focus on Sport, Health, Fashion, Smart Cities and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Typical targets include improving engagement in sport; tools for preventative healthcare; designing intelligent and functional fabrics; applications that improve connectivity; and sustainability and mobility in urban environments.

                                                 This will be a gee-whizz park

It is expected to be a place for experimentation, design and performance – for entrepreneurs and big businesses alike – a launchpad for British-based scale-ups and a ‘soft landing pad’ for companies coming to the UK for the first time.

With its base in London, it could make a much needed contribution to the development and commercialisation of UK technology. It will be a centre that is carefully tailored to early-stage businesses and in particular to those that are pioneering new technologies, and one that also has on hand high quality support, provided proactively.

                                      Scaleups badly need this kind of leadership

While the number of incubators and particularly co-working spaces in the UK has been growing substantially (there are probably now several thousand), few offer services to their occupants to this extent, yet they are possibly housing the unicorns of the future.

Many of these are run by individuals who have little hands-on experience of business or of business support agencies; and their links with the business community are often tenuous. ENTIQ however, was co-founded by two people who co-created Level39 – the innovation centre in Canary Wharf; and ran the Cognicity Programme for Canary Wharf Group, a 3D Fintech Lab for Dassault Systemes, and a Blockchain Lab project among other specialist innovation programmes. Claire Cockerton is a serial entrepreneur, and Eric van der Kleij had been the founding CEO of TechCity.

                                                        A very tough task

Making a success for early-stage businesses in all sorts of developing technologies in a Centre like this could well be as difficult a task as if all the students in a university were reading completely different subjects. It will require a remarkably sophisticated feat of collaborative support – to help all of the different businesses to develop and commercialise their products or services. Or else it may have a high failure rate.

With the rise in entrepreneurialism, support for startups and scaleups has got more sophisticated as Accelerators have proliferated and diversified; and Growth Builder programmes have come on the scene. With new developments in support evolving continually, there is an urgent need to help incubators and co-working spaces UK-wide to be able to offer them to their occupants.

UKBI (UK Business Incubator – the sector’s trade association) was founded some twenty years, but collapsed several years ago. The time is surely right for a new network of hothouses (incubators, co-working spaces and their ilk), that will help its members learn from one another and from outside experts about the latest practices and approaches for providing support to young businesses.

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Some comparable initiatives
This will be a larger project than the Daresbury Innovation Centre (http://wp.me/p3beJt-Y), launched several years ago in the vacuum left when the bid for the new Synchrotron facility went to Harwell; Daresbury has a wider range of businesses on its campus, but without as much support; similar too to Harwell (http://wp.me/p3beJt-r), which has a large number of businesses on its site – many related to the technology of its Synchrotron, where good technical support is at least on hand; but there is scant business support; and not unlike Rocket, a Berlin funder and supporter of early stage businesses (http://wp.me/p3beJt-8U), or the newly opened Edney Innovation Centre in Chattanooga, seen by its civic leaders as ‘the gateway to the city’s command-ing new business enterprise’ (New York Times.)

See also: Design your own Accelerators: an analytical review for innovationeers – johnwhatmore.com 8 Dec 2014 http://wp.me/p3beJt-K

John Whatmore
September 2016