According to BERR, there are currently around 4.7
million SMEs in the UK today, but where are the new technology
start-ups coming from? Steve Gold looks at the University of
Manchester's commercial incubators and some of their business
offspring.
So you're a post-grad student - or even a humble student -
studying for an IT qualification and you have a 'Eureka' moment,
coming up with a revolutionary idea that breaks new ground in terms
of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Perhaps because of the
academic nature of universities, these Eureka moments occur a lot
more frequently than you might think and a growing number of
universities now have the resources to assist staff, students and
others, in maximising the benefits of their ground-breaking
ideas.
The University of
Manchester is at the forefront of business incubation process
and, according to Allan Pritts, the university's marketing manager,
it has a proven track record of growing companies from scratch and
helping them at key points in their development and
commercialisation stages.
The university was formed in 2004 following the merger of the
Victoria University of Manchester (established 1880) and the
University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology
(UMIST - established 1824) and is now the largest single campus
university in the UK.
The origins of Manchester University's business incubation
facilities started in the 1980s and spun out of the uni's
technology training operations. All of the staff in the
university's technology departments, says Pritts, are aware of the
incubation process and how it works. "As a result, they are always
looking out for ideas from fellow staff and students that can be
incubated. Once they spot a possibility, they can refer the ideas
creator to the relevant incubation specialist and the process
begins," he says.
That's not to say that the road leading up to business
incubation isn't a complex one. "The process of evaluation is
complex. You have issues such as patents - we have in-house patent
specialists - and whether there's a real market for a given product
or service. All these factors need to be discussed by specialists
before a project can get rolling," he says.
Eureka concepts
On average, the University of Manchester has around 250
invention records - as it calls Eureka concepts - that go through
the initial stages of the business evaluation process every year.
Most do not see the commercial light of day, but they all get a
fair crack at the incubation process.
Once university staff involved in the start of the incubation
process have decided an idea is viable, a decision on whether to
licence the technology for use within the University's operations,
or to spin the technology out to a third-party firm, is taken. It's
at this stage that the university's two commercial arms - UMIP
(University of Manchester Intellectual Property) and UMIC
(University of Manchester Incubator Company) - enter the frame.
Generally speaking, UMIP fosters ideas and develops them for
licensing to third-party companies, while UMIC helps finance - from
an ongoing fund of £32m pounds - and incubate new companies to
develop the Eureka ideas plus concepts.
Wholly owned by the university, UMIP is a limited company with
around 40 staff - faculty oriented business management teams,
backed up by a central office that provides company secretarial,
marketing, legal and financial expertise. UMIP's role is to manage
intellectual property created at the university, with the company
holding the university's patent budget, managing its awards
programme and providing access to spin-out investment funds via The
UMIP Premier Fund. UMIP even has its own annual target of reaching
20 licences with commercial companies for its intellectual
property, as well as selling shares and collecting royalties on a
regular basis.
UMIC, meanwhile, provides facilities office and other, as well
as the management skills to get a new company rolling and help
develop the Eureka idea right through to the commercialisation
stage. The university-owned company's services including business
mentoring and incubation services, offering experienced business
support for start-ups, as well as introducing the ideas-makers to
contacts in the wider world via a series of planned events and
conferences.
According to Pritts, UMIC has been also been able to attract a
number of high value third-party new companies to its incubation
operation, ever since it was formed in late 1999.
Spotlight on the firms
One of its latest successes in the new IT company stakes is
Greenlight Computers, a firm which managing director Gary Dodson
describes as "dolphins in a sea of sharks," and which provides
out-sourced IT support services to 150-plus clients in north-west
England. The fledgeling company's support services include
networking, infrastructure design & supply, data management, IT
security, email management, web mastery and other specialist
technology facilities.
The two-year-old firm is currently developing shared IT service
for central Manchester under the `M1' brand, which signifies the
centre of the city's post code. With M1, Greenlight says it wants
to create a marketplace where central Manchester businesses can
make themselves visible to others in the area.
In the UMIC incubator itself, meanwhile, the university has
several high-tech firms in various stages, including: IPix, an LED
design company; MobySoft, a mobile solutions firm; NWT, an internet
content filtering enterprise; and Sparta Technologies, an IT
services company;
LED design company iPIX is developing a new generation of
entertainment industry LED technologies and has just unveiled a
high-powered LED system called the Satellite.
Mobysoft, meanwhile, is a child of the late 2000s, providing
mobile-enabled services to a range of companies that includes
Accumus Insurance and the BBC. The fledgeling company's technology
includes custom text message-based software for use out in the
field, as well as an Oracle software add-in that allows text
messages to be generated automatically.
NWT is working on a technology called Inteliguard, which its
describes as one of the first of a new generation of profiles-based
intelligent internet content filters for the educational, business
and internet service provider sectors.
On the intellectual side of things, Sparta Technologies is a
team of programmers who offer a range of coding services to the
public and private sector in the NorthWest, claiming to offer a
highly cost-effective set of services.
Newcastle gets a look in
Over the Pennines,
Newcastle University is
supporting business incubation through NETpark (North East
Technology Park) and, courtesy of an investment of £7.2m from the
government, a state-of-the-art scientific centre.
NETPark is said to be one of the fastest-growing science parks
in the UK, with a focus on the physical sciences, particularly
plastic electronics, micro-electronics, photonics, nanotechnology,
and their application in the fields of energy, defence, and
medical-related technologies. It was was founded by Durham County
Council along with several other partners and is managed by the
County Durham Development Company. The vice-chancellors of all five
North East universities (including Newcastle) are on the board.
The park, which has an astonishing 118 companies on its books,
has even gone virtual this year, with the creation of NETPark.Net,
a virtual science park and technology park with virtual office
facilities. These facilities allow new science and technology
companies throughout County Durham and the North East - as well as
companies fostered within the university incubation programme - to
open up on the internet with personalised content and pro-active
information via an online platform. Start-up costs come in at just
£99.
The £7.2m University Innovation Centre for Nanotechnology,
meanwhile, and which forms part of the university's INEX incubation
operation, was opened earlier this year by the Chancellor of
Exchequer, Alistair Darling. The Newcastle investment forms part of
a programme of investment in the North East that includes a £10m
fund to invest in green technologies such as solar photo-voltaics
projects seen in the ground-breaking solar panel facade on the
Northumberland Building at the University of Northumbria.
The commercial arm of Newcastle University - INEX - describes
itself a contract development, manufacturing and&
commercialisation centre for specialist electronic devices,
microsystems and nanotechnology (MNT). According to the university,
ever since its formation in late 2002, INEX's main aim has been to
work with technology innovators and systems integration firms to
develop and commercialise new technologies and products.
Interestingly - and largely thanks to its public sector funding
origins - INEX is now the largest microsystems and nanotechnology
facility in the UK, with microfabrication clean rooms, packaging
and test facilities, analytical and bioscience laboratories, and an
associated IT business incubator.
INEX's latest claim to fame is a project to help sufferers of
age-related brain damage recover lost functions through the use of
microchip implants. Under the Renachip project, which is being
funded by the European Commission's FP7 programme, INEX is managing
a Europe-wide study of technology which may have the potential to
rehabilitate damaged parts of the brain, using specially-developed
prosthetic chips. The project is still at an early stage, but
project manager Angela Silon says that INEX's partners are testing
the biomimetic technology on a model of the brain's neural network
that controls the eyeblink learning response.
Inter-university relations are high on the agenda at INEX, as
the operation's compound semiconductors division starting working
with the microelectronics and nanostructures group at the
University of Manchester late last year, to develop a new
generation of InP high-speed devices. InP devices, in case you were
wondering, support high-speed links on point-to-point microwave
links and communications and vehicle-based radar in the private
sector, as well as in defence applications such as electronic
warfare, missile seekers and radar.
The objective of the link-up between INEX and Manchester
University is to develop a route for the commercial exploitation of
the technology, which both university operations are developing.
According to Mo Missous, Professor of Semiconductor Materials and
Devices at the University of Manchester, the collaboration is a
natural progression for the university.
Professor Ken Snowdon, INEX's managing director, meanwhile, says
the link-up, which is being supported by a commercial partner
Integrated Compound Semiconductors, will help the formation of a
supply chain for InP high speed devices. This, he says, represents
a further important milestone in the delivery of INEX's mission as
a national facility to support the growth of the UK's micro- and
nano-technology enabled high technology industry.