It all started with an award: Celebrating one year as Centre Director at Future Space

Last month was something of a milestone, both for Future Space and for me personally. For Future Space, our amazing UWE-based innovation centre that is home to what are surely some of the most inspiring tech startups in the region, we’ve just hit the big 5-0-0. And to be clear, that’s jobs. Over 500 new jobs have been created at the centre during our 8-year lifetime. That’s huge. And for me, last month marked my one year anniversary in the role of Centre Director. That’s less huge, but to me it’s just as meaningful, and it gives me a chance to reflect a little bit on all that’s been achieved at Future Space over the past 12 months...

Somewhat unusually for a brand new job, it all started with an award. To be honest, I don't remember a lot from my first couple of months at Future Space, but I do recall the night at Sandy Park quite well. Barely four weeks into the job, we went as a team to the 2023 Tech South West Awards, having been shortlisted for the ‘Supporting the Sector’ award. And, sensationally, we won it. Well, the team won it. I could take zero credit, but it did teach me my first lesson: Future Space was, and continues to be, a truly inspiring community, one that is valued across the South West’s tech ecosystem. And as such my role was simply to build on the centre’s success and help to move the dial towards something even more ambitious.

The Brand

One of the first things I set my sights on was the Future Space brand. Our centre's mission to nurture trailblazing high-tech businesses in partnership with the University of the West of England has always been strong, but what I felt needed a tad more work was in how this mission was being communicated as a uniquely university-partnered offering - to everyone.

What followed was a brand refresh, followed by a new website, a shiny new promo video, new social media, plus a new sub-brand in the shape of ‘Innovate Together’ that manifests as a breakfast series, a monthly podcast, and – yep – the think piece you’re reading now… 'Innovate Together' was the perfect mechanism for us to shout about who we really are.

Some invaluable brand messaging work was done to help us move beyond the concept of selling space as our primary product. We do sell space, of course – and it is fantastic space. But really the space is just the setting for what happens next. Being based at the University of the West of England means that we can go beyond offering 1-1 business support – our companies can be opened up to a whole world of collaborative R&D possibilities with academics, facilities, students, courses and events. And it’s always been clear to everyone at Future Space that if we get this offer right, then it becomes so much more than just added value – it fundamentally makes the entire innovation process easier, faster and more pioneering for those businesses seeking to work right at the frontier of what’s possible.

And so in terms of the brand, I soon figured out that - to adopt the language of marketing archetypes - Future Space is at once ‘The Hero’, i.e., striving to make the world a better place by nurturing the next generation of startup companies, but it’s also kind of ‘The Sage’, which is to say that we place considerable value in new knowledge and in approaching business growth through the positioning of education as the path to breakthrough.

The Offering

In effect, by both inwardly and outwardly recognising the Future Space brand as a unique mixture of ‘The Hero’ and ‘The Sage’ customer archetypes opened the door to us rethinking our innovation offering to all our businesses. After all, it’s one thing being able to properly communicate what university-partnered innovation means – it’s something else entirely to deliver it. And so what we ended up with was an all-new vision statement that embraces the idea that, if a set of university-partnered support services and products can be designed well enough, then there’s no reason why those services and product cannot work to support the growth of both startups and the whole university simultaneously. As we now see it:

A lot of last year was about building stronger partnerships with those Schools across the University of the West of England that align most closely with the needs of our companies. And the work paid off: we now have a formalised R&D support offering in place, enabling businesses to devise projects for up to 6 months that can be run through the disciplinary lens of either Applied Sciences, Engineering, Data Science or Product Design. These projects are led by talented groups of students, supported by academics, and in most cases come with access to selected university facilities to support research as needed. We’re also making strides in how we facilitate more sustained access to said university facilities to support things like prototyping, trial and testing, and other research and development.

What’s more, our R&D support now compliments an existing – albeit further strengthened – business support service, much of which stems from the Oxford Innovation Space network. In truth, I’ve been particularly keen to reconcile the kind of advice-based, one-to-one business support that Oxford Innovation Space is known for with the one-to-many type of business support that universities tend to provide. For me, it’s not that either approach is better – rather, much like the gulf between academia and industry more broadly, it’s simply that both worlds do things differently and, together, can offer different insights and value.

In short, there’s plenty of room for both models to co-exist, which is why we’ve also been firming up our Marketing Support offering based on access to both external advisors in the comms, marketing and design ecosystem, as well as by harnessing postgraduate students from UWE’s Business School to lead on marketing projects, be it market positioning or website redesign. We can also signpost companies to fantastic initiatives like New Wave Agency based in the School of Arts, where recent creative graduates are paid by our companies to produce the likes of promo videos, brand templates and new websites.

All things considered, then, things are going pretty well. Stats-wise, around 70% of all Future Space companies are currently working with the university in one way or another. Since August, we’ve run approximately 40 of the R&D student projects I described above, with 266 UWE students (and counting) working with our companies on various projects.

For me, however, it’s when you see it all come together for individual businesses that all the work feels properly worthwhile. Take the example of NPK Recovery, one of our brilliant green tech businesses led by Hannah Van Den Burgh that are turning human urine into fertiliser. During this past year alone, NKP Recovery have worked with four MRes students from both the Applied Sciences and Engineering Schools, have hired one UWE-funded internship and now employ one UWE graduate. Having collaborated with around seven academics, they’ve since been granted Visiting Researcher status in the School of Applied Sciences, which led to a sizeable amount of external grant funding being awarded, some of which will be used to support further R&D activity with the university next year. The team has even made use of a range of the university’s professional development courses. And this has all helped pave the way to some hugely impressive growth for the company, creating a number of new jobs for the team, a hefty sum in investments, plus the development of an entirely new product.?

The Building

Now, the fact that I’ve got this far into an article about my first year as Centre Director and haven’t yet spoken about the expansion shows just how intense this past year has been. Thankfully, managing the mobilisation of our new 10,000 square feet of space was not something I had to personally oversee – that unenviable task was left to far more practically minded people, including the great Tom El-Shawk, our irreplaceable Centre Manager.

But what a triumph this space is. The space that we lovingly still refer to as ‘W Block’ has been open for only a few months and is already 75% full, thus far serving mainly as grow-on space for some of our most inspiring companies like Sora Aviation, Nusku, Albotherm and Altered Carbon. For me, though, the new space became the perfect opportunity to both reignite interest in Future Space to those already familiar with what we do, and also to tell a whole new story based on our future ambition to become the go-to home for the most trailblazing, R&D-driven tech startups across Bristol, the South West and beyond.

As much as I enjoy the brand storytelling side of what I do, I didn’t get to completely avoid managing any building development work, unfortunately. For in the midst of the W-block expansion, we were also given the opportunity to renovate the main Future Space networking area (thanks WECA!). Part way-finding project, part re-brand exercise, the renovation actually turned out to an ideal chance to make our newfound university-partnered agenda visible for all to see – quite literarily painting the vision on the walls. Interior design is not necessarily a skill that I would include on my CV, but the ambition was for Future Space to feel more like a true university space, albeit one that still retains its commercial status – feeling like a natural home for both our ‘Hero’ and ‘Sage’ mindsets.

The Future?

And like just that, the year was over, ending exactly like it started, back once again at the Tech South West Awards. And also just like it started, the year ended with an award. Well, two awards, in fact. This time we not only picked up the ‘Supporting the Sector’ award for the second year running, but we also claimed the ‘Commitment to Talent’ prize. This one was extra special for me. It was in many ways a recognition of so much of what I’d been striving to do since taking the top job at Future Space: the entire sector needs to do a much better job of joining up education with industry, being more imaginative in how the former goes about training and preparing young people for the new kinds of jobs that will be required for the workplaces of the future. Being recognised by Tech South West for our small efforts to at least try and support this critical mission means an awful lot to me.?

So where, then, do I go from here? 2025 will be very different for Future Space as we look to attract more and more new companies into our talented community whilst consolidating all of the strategic and operational endeavours of the past twelve months. But that’s not to say that nothing exciting is on the horizon – far from it. Looking into the university, we’ll be finalising and recruiting for a newly redesigned Master of Business Administration degree, run in formal partnership with Future Space. We hope to use the MBA to further bolster our business support, essentially by granting all our companies sustained access to the kind of MBA-level talent that can add genuine, all-round value to the growth of the business.

And looking out into the big wide world, we’re absolutely delighted to be partnering with Tech South West once again – this time on a set of Accelerator-style Growth Forge days. Future Space will be a key partner, focusing on the theme of emerging technology. We’ll be sharing news and announcements about this come January, so do watch this space…

But crucially, to everyone who helps make Future Space such an inspiring, supportive, collaborative and – don't you forget – multi-award-winning innovation centre, thank you. We are what we are only because of our community. Me? Well I’m just excited to be part of it.