Conservative Party Conference: NESTA and the business Start-Up Hub

Date: 03.10.2011 12:30 - 14:00

Location: The Lecture Room, Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, Manchester, M2 3JL

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Watch the event video

NESTA welcomed Damian Collins MP, Chair of the Conservative Start-Up to an event discussing the importance of start-ups to the economy and the support they need to help them succeed. Damian was keen to do something about supporting economic growth rather than just talk about it.

The Start-Up Hub is Damian's initiative and he worked with corporate sponsors from Blackberry, Barclays and Fujitsu to form an expert panel to judge a competition for start-up companies. A shortlisted group of nine organisations were invited to exhibit at the Conservative Conference and delegates were given the opportunity to vote for their favourite.

We were pleased to be joined by all of the judges - Liz Kanter from Blackberry, Simon Carter from Fujitsu and Jon Whitehouse from Barclays as well as representatives from the successfully shortlisted panellists.

There was a broad ranging discussion in which there was agreement that start-ups had to 'start-up, stand-up and stay-up' and that initiatives such as the Start-Up Hub would help this to happen. The panel were of the opinion that start-ups were vital to the continued success of large businesses and so it is in the interest of large businesses to be supportive.

The audience was interested (off the back of the Chancellor's speech) in access to finance and there was much discussion about the scalability of crowd sourced finance and additional questions around the regulation and legality of the model.

Chair: Jon Kingsbury, NESTA Creative Industries Programme Director

Speakers:

• Damian Collins MP, initiator of the Start-Up Hub
• Liz Kanter, Director of Government Relations, Research in Motion
• Simon Blagden, Head of Government Relations , Fujitsu Europe
• Jon Whitehouse, Head of Government Relations, Barclays