SETsquared CONFERENCE 2021

Engine Shed and SETsquared Bristol

I promised Monika I wouldn’t break SETsquared Bristol during my interim year. Months later and an empty building, no events, departing tenants and an uncertain future and I thought I was in big trouble on her return! Thankfully she left the incredible SETsquared Bristol and Engine Shed teams and amazing support from the Partnership.

This goes to everyone in Bristol & the SETsquared Partnership for resilience in 2020. In Bristol we came back from the quietest days in April to capacity membership and 95% occupancy by December with optimism to build in 2021. Special mentions: Lisa for putting the whole incubator online in 22 hours. Rhian for a very real, Virtual success in our biggest TechXpo. Paul for inclusivity with the Breakthrough Bursary and Enterprising Women. Tamsin for continental recognition with the Europas. Grev & Rick for EiR wisdom. And Marty for keeping us sane!

In Bristol it’s been a good year, for a bad year. Huge thanks to the Bristol team and well done to everyone in SETsquared partnership.

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New Enterprise Competition, Faye Tromans and Lauren Ellse, University of Bristol

Like many initiatives, 2020 meant many changes to planned activities. In March, we were in full swing for the Growth stage of our New Enterprise Competitions, which always commences with a celebration event where our winners are announced.

In order to deliver a quality programme, helping candidates to gain recognition and build their networks, we instead ran a digital People’s Choice award marketing campaign. This included publishing recorded pitches from the 10 finalist businesses and having the public vote on their favourites.

Typically, our in person celebration events hosts 100-150 people attending. By changing our celebration to a digital marketing, email sprint campaign, we received more recognition and publicity than ever for the competition and the finalists. In the end, we received nearly 2500 individual votes! Lauren Ellse and Faye Tromans were instrumental in that success and proved it’s something worth keeping for years to come.

www.bristol.ac.uk/red/nec/

www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2020/may/nec-2020-kaedim-winner.html

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The Programme and Events Team, SETsquared Central

In 2020 the Programme and Events Team rose to the challenge again, with their usual flair, creativity and determination. With the prospect of Covid coming, the team didn’t wait to adapt their delivery, they got ahead of the game with the first online event being delivered at the beginning of March. They then worked tirelessly as lockdown hit to have all workshops, events, showcases and training programmes converted to an online format in just three weeks.

They added two more major showcases to the diary in 2020, running NextGen Invest and MedTech as well as GradInvest and Invest 2020, and these showcases attracted over 701 investors seeing pitches from 62 companies. The team also ran on-line ‘booths’ for SETsquared at the major international events, Global Corporate Venturing Symposiums and FT Future of Mobility. They worked incredibly hard to ensure audiences for all events where higher online culminating in Invest 2020 having the highest number of investor attendance ever with 226 investors.

This is a team effort headed up by Serena Giaminardi with Andrea Kelly, Chloe White, Chris Hill, Emilie King, Jenny Downard, Joanna Mieszczak, Karina Moore, Tabita Vidovic.