Boost for space incubators during Global Entrepreneurship Week
The UK Space Agency has announced an extra £90,000 of funding for three of its successful business incubation centres.
Leicester Dock Business Incubation Centre. Credit: Maber.
The money will go to centres in Nottingham, Leicester and Durham, which support entrepreneurs and small companies in the space industry.
The UK Space Agency is working with UK industry to deliver world-class science innovation support, in line with the Government’s Industrial Strategy, which emphasises the importance of science, innovation and skills.
Helen Roberts, Regional Growth Manager at the UK Space Agency, said:
We are delighted to award this additional financial support to these three incubators which have successfully supported more than 30 new and innovative space companies across the regions, providing valuable jobs to the UK. The feedback from the supported companies has been extremely positive and the additional funding from the UK Space Agency will be used to stimulate further opportunities for start-ups by these experienced incubators.
Grants of £30,000 each have been given to the University of Nottingham Innovation Park (UNIP), Leicester Dock and Business Durham. The three centres were initially given £50,000 each from the UK Space Agency in 2016 and have supported 32 new companies since then.
The announcement comes during Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2017, which started on Monday and runs until 19 November. GEW involves 164 countries and network of more than 17,000 partner organizations. There are hundreds of events taking place across the UK and thousands more around the world.
The space sector is a UK success story, underpinning industries worth more than £250 billion to the UK economy, with ambitious plans to achieve 10% of the global space market by 2030. Much of this growth is expected to come from companies using space-derived data or services in a broad range of different sectors.
The UK Space Agency supports 11 business incubators across the UK. They are:
- Leicester Dock
- Business Durham
- University of Nottingham Innovation Park (UNIP)
- STEP Space Business Incubation, Daresbury
- ESA BIC, Harwell
- Glyndwr Innovations, North Wales
- Loughborough University Space Incubator
- National Oceanography Centre’s Marine Robotics Innovation Centre & the University of Portsmouth’s Innovation Space
- SETsquared, Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey
- Scottish Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications, Glasgow
- South West Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications
For more information and contact details for each business incubator, visit the SetSquared website.