🧭 Our presence in the North West is growing! We’ve launched a partnership with Lancashire-based Northern Reach, which connects founders across the north, leveraging strong credentials delivering projects such as Lancashire Innovation Festival and Lancashire Digital Hub: Powered by Innovate Lancashire and Barclays Eagle Labs.
🤝 Northern Reach’s mission aligns with our own. At Plexal, we look nationwide to solve society’s most pressing problems through accelerating access to novel startup solutions across the regions, effectively closing the gap between organisations that otherwise wouldn’t have connected.
💥 The impact of this is driving national security progress, economic growth and social prosperity, which we do by building physical places for innovation, delivering innovation services through programmes and consultancy and establishing regional clusters of excellence.
🗣️ Russell Gundry, Senior Director of Clusters at Plexal, says: “Our model with Northern Reach will see us work together to first deliver early-stage SME support and advice locally. From that initial touchpoint, we’ll provide tailored high-impact interventions, such as needs accelerators, keynotes, workshops and more across growth hubs in the region.
“This builds on our existing work across projects including DiSH in Manchester with Barclays Eagle Labs and NW CyberCom with six partner universities. We’re also well positioned to support the Samlesbury Enterprise Zone, which Lancashire County Council has called ‘a place to catalyse innovation between the National Cyber Force, large industry partners, education institutions, agile businesses and expert practitioners.’
“With so many exciting innovation-driven events taking place, we’ll be running a series of focus groups with SMEs at key sites to understand where they are on their business journey, how well prepared they are for change and what would want to see from the emergence of a new cluster.”
🗺️ Plexal and Northern Reach are kicking off their partnership by hosting roundtables across Lancashire this month. These sessions will provide local companies a better understanding about the NCF arrival in Samlesbury, requirements for engagement, as well as a chance for us to gauge where Lancashire businesses require support from the local ecosystem to meaningfully engage in this opportunity.
📍 Our first sessions will take place in Lancaster, Chorley and Burnley with more to follow, so let us know which locations you'd like us to visit next!
Innovate Lancashire | Dan Knowles | Mark Thwaite | Charlotte West | Catherine Hadfield | Tom Marshall | Francesca Castelo | #Innovation | #Collaboration | #NorthWest | #BusinessGrowth | #Startups | #ScalingUp | #Lancashire | #Clusters
