Norwich Research Park hosts latest Enterprise event to showcase businesses

Image: www.norwichresearchpark.com

Following the success of its first Enterprise event held in February, Anglia Innovation Partnership, the organisation that runs Norwich Research Park, has held its second event to showcase its research and commercialisation activity.

The event, dubbed ‘Enterprise Tuesday’, was held on Tuesday 6 June at the John Innes Conference Centre at Norwich Research Park starting at 1.30pm. It featured presentations from many of the Park’s entrepreneurial researchers and ground-breaking businesses.

It also highlighted the many opportunities that Norwich Research Park offers new companies whether they are spin-outs, spin-ins, start-ups or scale-ups and raise awareness to the regional business communities of the benefits of engaging more with the scientists and researchers working at the Park.

The speakers included:

Dr Rosaria Caplilongo of PFBio, a new company that is looking to supply the agricultural industry with sustainable bacteria-based products to replace pesticides
Daria Golubova of MVPea who are developing pea-based snacks and ingredients for healthier diets
Prof G. Richard Stephenson of CellExcel a spin-out from the UEA who have developed plant-based materials for use in car manufacturing
Dr Natassja Bush of Inspiralis a spin-out from the John Innes Centre which produces kits with enzymes called DNA topoisomerases, used in development of antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs.
Dr Jack Peart of Tropic which is pioneering the use of gene-editing in developing more disease-resistant bananas and coffee plants
Prof Martin Warren from The Biofortification Hub at the Quadram Institute.
Dr Melissa Antoniou-Kourounioti from the Food Health Safety Network at the Quadram Institute.
Dr Cian Duggan from Resurrect Bio, a plant biotech start-up, based in London working on improving the immune system of crops.
Dr Darren Heavens from Airseq, a spin-out from the Earlham Institute that are creating an innovative unbiased bio-surveillance system that detects any pathogen in air samples in near-real-time.

Norwich Research Park is already home to 40 companies. A number of them, such as Tropic, Colorifix and Leaf Expression Systems, are high growth businesses who have raised significant investment, increased their workforces and are scaling up their customer operations. A number of the new businesses have spun-out of the institutions with the support of the park enterprise strategy, translating their science breakthroughs into fully functioning businesses.

Roz Bird, CEO of Anglia Innovation Partnership, said “We launched our Enterprise Strategy last May with the aim of creating an eco-system and supportive community that would encourage and nurture new businesses be they spin-outs, spin-ins or start-ups. It includes entrepreneurship schemes, an early-stage Explorer Fund, pre-seed and seed funding to help them establish the credibility of their products and business models so that they are effectively ‘investment-ready’ when they need to scale up.

“These events are a great platform on which to showcase the successes that have been achieved by companies already established at Norwich Research Park and to highlight what’s coming next in terms of the new generation of entrepreneurs.

The event was also kindly supported by the New Anglia LEP’s Connected Innovation Programme.