A lot of good things are happening out there...
| Published date | 24 April 2024 |
| Publication title | Loughborough Echo |
I was impressed by what I discovered there.
Pete Hitchings and I met at Sport- Park, a large office building within the Loughborough University's Science and Enterprise Park (LUSEP).
It houses a lot of sport-related organisations - it's one of the things the town is most known for - such as Sport England and British Swimming. Pete is the research and enterprise officer at Loughborough University.
He's the type of guy who I've been fortunate enough to meet time and again in my travels, someone who knows everyone in town and keeps the connections between different parts of the local economic ecosphere in close contact with each other.
He's from Leicester originally and worked for the University of Leicester until he took the job at Loughborough University about four-and-ahalf years ago.
"I felt it was somewhere I could come and do something interesting, where I could make a difference," he said.
We walked over to the Holywell Building, which houses an incubator hub for recent start-up ventures.
A lot of the companies there are technology-based but certainly not all - for instance, there was Callum Davey, a guy who runs a consultancy based around business training, using things learned across sport and the military to help companies better strategise and work as a team, called Inside Edge People.
But it was the ambition of the tech start-up owner/operators I met that day which has stayed with me most since.
There was Tom Jeliffe, whose business, Tzuka, is building a prototype of sports durable headphones that wouldn't require a smart phone to access information. This is an idea that could be worth a fortune if it comes off.
Then there's Kate Allan, whose company, ExpHand, is creating prosthetics that grow with a person throughout their childhood.
"The impact that the right prosthesis can have on a young life can be immense," Kate told me.
"Both from a practical standpoint and an emotional one.
"To have available a product that can adapt to a young person's growing body, forgoing the need to constantly be having to both change prosthetics as well as never having them fit entirely properly, will change thousands of people's lives for the better."
While what ultimately powers the incubation hub in the Holywell Building in LUSEP are the ideas and efforts of the entrepreneurs who do their work there, it...
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