
News / Awards
SETsquared ranked best incubator in the world
SETsquared, the enterprise partnership of the universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, was recognised as the best performing university business incubator in the globe by UBI Global, experts in incubators and accelerators, at its investor showcase event held in London. The UBI Index is the first global index to benchmark the performance and best practice of university business incubators.
It was ranked alongside some of the world’s best university business incubators, including the Innovation Incubation Center at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan and The DMZ (Digital Media Zone) at Ryerson University, Toronto.
Started 13 years ago, SETsquared has supported over 1,000 hi-tech start-ups to develop and raise more than £1bn of investment, as well as contributing over £3.8bn to the UK economy with further £15bn contribution estimated over the next 10 years. The partnership currently supports 265 companies across its centres and has created over 9,000 new jobs. Over the last year SETsquared has opened in Basingstoke to help entrepreneurs develop new businesses around next generation 5G mobile technology, and run innovation programmes for the NHS and UK Space Agency.
Simon Bond, innovation director at SETsquared, said: “It’s incredible to be recognised as the top university incubator in the world, and we’re all delighted by the news. ‘Team SETsquared’ has worked extremely hard to fulfill our commitment to helping entrepreneurs and start-ups and this top ranking is a real testament to the skill of our staff and the success of the high-tech, high growth potential ventures we work with.
“The UK was recently ranked as the second most innovative country in the world by the Global Innovation Index for its performance in infrastructure, market sophistication, knowledge, technology and creative outputs, and SETsquared is very proud to have played our part in putting the UK on the map as one of the top performing countries for innovation.”
SETsquared’s work includes schemes to help entrepreneurs turn their business ideas into investor propositions, give researchers the skills to turn projects into commercial realities and businesses commercialise their propositions.