The themes of this year’s GCV Symposium – sustainability and impact investing – capture the “let us build back better” attitude that I have seen emerging across our ecosystem as we start to reimagine what our future could and should be like.
GCV Symposium’s choice of themes has an uncanny knack for setting the agenda for the future – May 2019’s theme was “navigating through the turbulence”.
How prophetic and what a timely call for preparedness. This year’s choices of sustainability and impact investing are similarly agenda-setting and I am certain they will define our next decade and more.
SETsquared has “navigated the turbulence” of the past couple of years and is back, both bigger and better. In truth, SETsquared has always been growing – today’s ecosystem of spinout, startup and scale-up ventures is tenfold the original scale envisaged when we were founded in 2002.
However, with Cardiff University joining in September 2021, SETsquared is now an enterprise partnership of six research-intensive universities, and this really increases our scale.
Cardiff’s new incubation space – Cardiff Innovations@sbarc – which opens this winter will add significantly to our established network of innovation centres in Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey. Meanwhile the university partners continue to develop new facilities that attract high-growth companies by embedding SETsquared into their innovation and applied research initiatives. Two recent examples are the Surrey Heartlands Health Tech Accelerator of which University of Surrey is a core partner and the University of Bath-led Innovation Centre for Applied Sustainable Technologies, both of which offer the companies they work with access to SETsquared.
Cardiff increases SETsquared’s scope too. SETsquared member companies have always made an important contribution to the economic development of our region. As a partnership of six universities, SETsquared will now develop across a bigger geography which includes the south of Wales as well as England, and undoubtedly our scope of activities will develop as a result.
Backing sustainable tech ventures
The ambition of SETsquared has increased as well. The COP26 Summit focusses the world’s attention on the action required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and achieve net zero by 2050. It is a challenge that touches everyone and every organisation in the world. As a result, SETsquared is doubling-down on our support of the innovation-led companies that we all need to be successful in order to achieve these targets.
• We are increasing the number of new university spinouts and licensing opportunities with a new fast-track Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research (ICURe) programme which is exclusively for energy and environmental research.
• We are opening up new investment opportunities for our startups with the new Climatetech: Innovation & Investment Roundtable – an initiative that includes the participation of leading venture investment organisations such Mitsubishi Venture Office and Zero Carbon Capital.
• We have launched a new campaign to Scale-Up Sustainable Technologies venture’s Research, Development, and Innovation projects with our universities.
SETsquared has grown in scale, scope and ambition. As a result, we are now more ready than ever to step up to the most pressing challenges of our age and unlock investment for our ventures to deliver even more innovation, impact and growth. SETsquared continues to be very much “open for business” and we welcome ventures, entrepreneurs, and investors to our programmes and our ecosystem.
To find out more about any of the initiatives mentioned in this article, visit: SETsquared.co.uk