Technology, Market and Company Journeys: How Can We Help Them Succeed? - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 210

• Putting in place pre-incubators through outreach programmes in other local
institutions which may have individual entrepreneurs or groups of entrepreneurs
that are interested in building a business.
• Working with students on entrepreneurship programmes in the host university's
business school.

Once an enterprise has reached the phase of a warrantable product on the
market it would be usual to push them into alternative larger but less well serviced
accommodation.
At this stage there is some benefit from keeping these companies on the Park as
they provide valuable income, they continue to develop and through this devel-
opment employ and train people which helps to add to the capacity of the skills
base in a region and they can attract valuable foreign direct investment Fig. 13 .
One of the areas with greatest potential for development relates to raising
appropriate finance. The value of appropriate finance is that this by definition
implies that those making the investment are well connected to the potential
market place for the new business. International connections in this process is
important and worthy of further thought and development Fig. 14 .
Significant effort has been directed at establishing business incubation pro-
grammes which enable companies to take the first steps of taking forward ideas.
However, an area of work that has potential for science and technology parks is to
develop business acceleration activities. These accelerators utilise formal training
for entrepreneurs as part of the process of building a business. An example in the
UK is the ''New Me'' programme that has been developed by The Centre for
Micro Business which is based in the UK and offers a business led programme that
can be added to a business incubation programme. 1
These are more focussed on enterprises that have begun to penetrate markets,
have a compelling business case but need additional investment in their skills base
and the finances of the company.
The transition from the incubator to the accelerator often comes with closer
engagement in the company by investors as they expect faster results from the
process.
One of the features of business acceleration is access to high growth coaching
programmes that assist company executives create internal environments to sup-
port growth Fig. 15 .
One of the important features of science parks is the ability to support com-
panies above and beyond incubation by providing the space and resources to
support them as they grow. To achieve this there is a greater emphasis on the
quality and flexibility of business accommodation, good access to skills, tech-
nology to support a customer base.

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