MSP plans to extend services to non-tenants

MANCHESTER Science Park last night announced plans to offer its business support services to non-tenant companies, as it celebrated its Silver Anniversary.

More than 300 guests gathered at a civic reception at Manchester Town Hall to celebrate the business park’s 25th birthday and acknowledge the support it has given to knowledge based businesses.

Jane Davies, chief executive of Manchester Science Park, said it had plans to extend its services beyond the boundaries of its own facilities.

She said it would start by focussing on companies around the Oxford Road corridor, before offering its services across the city region.

She said: “MSP has already created a working structure within its own community to encourage innovation, to support the development of innovative, knowledge based businesses and to encourage collaboration between academia and business.”

She added: “Manchester has the potential to become a national economic powerhouse and MSP, as a vital part of the Manchester offer, will help the city region to achieve that potential.”

Manchester Science Park, a collaboration between the University of Manchester, the City Council and the private sector, was launched in 1984, a time of economic uncertainty in the UK.
 
When it first opened its doors, the science park consisted of just one building, Enterprise House.

Today it offers laboratory and office space at seven buildings on the main Manchester Science Park site, which is adjacent to the University of Manchester, as well as at its campuses at Manchester Technopark in Birley Fields and One Central Park in North East Manchester.

It is home to some 90 tenant companies, which span sectors including environmental technologies, digital media, ICT, industrial technologies and bio-healthcare.

Ms Davies said: “Recession is often a time when the best ideas and innovations come to the fore and, in the early 1980s, as an antidote to the decline of the manufacturing sector, there was evidence in America that university research could be exploited for economic benefit.

“It was from this idea that Manchester Science Park’s founding chairman, Robin Skelton, drew the vision for… an organisation that would actively work with the city to develop a diverse economy based on knowledge.”