Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship

The Growth, Acceleration and Investment Network (GAIN) “was founded by Plymouth University, Plymouth City Council and Tamar Science Park to accelerate the creation, growth and investment in high quality businesses and ideas to create wealth and jobs in the South West“. It is a regional partnership involving formation zones, innovation centres, business networks and the national University Enterprise Network. Through its partners GAIN is involved with more than 500 businesses. It seeks to add value by creating “a focused and accessible business ecosystem of aspirational businesses and investors”.

GAIN has different though related value propositions for businesses, for people with ideas, for investors and for partners.

• “For investors: GAIN will reduce risk and maximise growth by finding the best businesses and ideas, providing a first look at potential deals, bringing intelligence together in one place and helping businesses become investment-ready.
  For partners: GAIN puts you at the heart of the South West’s most important business growth network.“

GAIN20 will give “the most innovative and exciting businesses in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset exclusive access to a unique series of opportunities and support over 12 months. … The aim is [to] boost enterprise and innovation across the region. …. Half of the GAIN20 will be recruited through Crowdfunder … ”

Some partners …

Formation Zone is a business start-up service (incubator) based on Plymouth University campus. The university also manages three Innovation Centres in Cornwall on behalf of Cornwall Council: at Pool, Penryn, and Truro. Unlike the BETA Enterprise Programme, the service is open to everyone. They are looking for innovative start-ups in these sectors: creative industries; hi-tech; marine, environmental, advanced engineering; health and well-being.

X Forces, based in London, supports ex-forces people and their families to start up businesses by providing them with loans, mentoring and support. People who think they could support X-FORCES with sponsoring, mentoring, work experience, contribution to the start-up fund of by offering a service or product are asked to contact admin@x-forces.com.

THINQTANQ is a socially-minded business based in Plymouth. It offers a range of office and workspace facilities.

Business Information Point provides advice, guidance, business support, training and information to both pre-start and existing businesses.

 

The Faculty of Business has five schools: business; management; law; government; and tourism & hospitality. The Business School focuses on undergraduate courses while the Plymouth Graduate School of Management has a range of post-graduate courses (listed at the bottom of its website page) including entrepreneurship.

The staff in the Faculty of Business are shown here.

All the post-graduate courses offered by the university are listed here.

The Futures Entrepreneurship Centre … “seeks to instil and develop entrepreneurial skills of students within the Faculty of Business” … and is linked to the MSc programmes in ‘Entrepreneurship‘  and ‘Entrepreneurship and International Development‘. Its activities “focus on contributing towards the socio-economic growth of the area through five pillars” These are: global thinking; sustainability; ethics; entrepreneurialism; and innovation. It has a blog.

The BETA Enterprise Programme enables UK undergraduate and postgraduate students currently studying at the university to develop a business idea alongside their course studies.The programme provides:

• a business mentor (either a university expert, an entrepreneur or  a member of the Plymouth business community) to guide the development of the business idea;
• a programme of workshops, guest lectures and networking events which run from November until June;
• an opportunity to pitch to a panel for funding of up to £1,500 which can be used to buy materials and products needed for the business, to rent incubation space, to pay for training and professional courses or to cover legal costs.

The Faculty of Business has local and regional enterprise partnerships, eg an affiliation with the Growth, Acceleration and Investment Network (GAIN) – see separate blog post.

In this video, Steve Blank identifies six different types of startup:

1. lifestyle start-up – an enterprise where a single entrepreneur makes a sufficient living out of pursuing a passion (for example surfing);
2. small business startup – intended to be a nothing more than a profitable small enterprise such as family grocery store;
3. scalable start-up – the founders have £billion ambitions for growth to become a large company;
4. large company sustaining innovation – initiatives within a large company to stimulate innovation in order to maintain competitive position.;
5. buyable start-up – a startup intended to be sold to a large corporation once the business model has been shown to work; and
6. social entrepreneurship start-ups.

Blank argues that these each need different entrepreneurial skillsets.

A business model helps to answer the question: how do you plan to make money? Behind that question are other questions:

• Who’s your target customer?
• What customer problem or challenge do you solve?
• What value do you deliver?
• How will you reach, acquire, and keep customers?
• How will you define and differentiate your offering?
• How will you generate revenue?
• What’s your cost structure?
• What’s your profit margin?

 

In this 42 minute video, Alex Osterwalder gives a good explanation of the Business Model Canvas.