A lot of good things are happening out there...
Charity consultant and journalist Nick Tyrone visited Loughborough for the first time recently and found a thriving and vibrant economy. Here he shares his thoughts on what the town has to offer, and the valuable role its university plays locally and nationally
IHEADED to Loughborough recently as part of a project I’m working on for a charity called the Jobs Foundation, a mission around studying jobs and opportunities for employment across the country.
I had never been to the town before and didn’t know what to expect.
I was impressed by what I discovered there.
Pete Hitchings and I met at SportPark, 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 wouldn’t exist without Loughborough University.
And that’s where the key role universities play in local economies comes into play.
One of the things I find again and again as I travel across England and Wales – and this most definitely applies to Loughborough – is how important universities are in ways I hadn’t considered before.
One is in a “levelling up” sense – they disperse talent all over the country, bringing people to a town they had never been to before, where they then stay and start a business, bringing money to the place as well as new jobs.
One entrepreneur in the Hollywell Building sheepishly told me that “I hadn’t even heard of Loughborough before I applied for uni here”.
Another way in which universities are so valuable to local economies is that they often establish incubation hubs, like the one in the Holywell Building, that allow graduates to become entrepreneurs in a space that supports them, gives them a network they wouldn’t otherwise have if they tried to do it all by themselves, and small levels of financial support, even if it’s just free or reduced office rent.
Within the debate about universities, how we fund them and the role they play in society, their value to private enterprise is not talked about nearly enough.
Most of the stories you hear these days about the British economy are unfortunately negative ones.
Particularly when talking about anywhere outside of London and a handful of other large cities.
Yet there are tons of positive stories to be found – of people working hard, trying to get on, building the businesses of the future.
We are often too stuck in the idea that looking ahead at Britain’s future must be filled with doom and gloom.
There are a lot of good things happening out there – in Loughborough and elsewhere.