University of Birmingham

Title: Climate Innovation Platform

Duration: 3.16 mins

Begins

[Logo of Climate Innovation Platform]

[Professor Martin Freer, Director of the Birmingham Energy Institute.] CIP, the Climate Innovation Platform is a platform for supporting businesses, driving their innovation, taking products and services through into market.

[Michael Boxwell, Group CEO, Voltempo Limited.] We got involved with the CIP program because we needed a lot of extra support, we were very keen and very enthusiastic, very knowledgeable engineers, we weren't necessarily good business people. We needed a hand in making sure that we could get to that stage where we were an investable business, where we had a proper product design where we could be relevant to the market and we've done a lot of that because of the CIP.

[Paul Jordan, Business Leader, Energy Systems Catapult.] We take what we call a whole systems thinking that we bring and what that means is thinking about how you understand the physical system but also the end user, the consumer challenges, but also thinking about the challenges between the different energy vectors. We at the Catapult have all those capabilities that we can help those SMEs address, those challenges wherever they may be.

There's significant capability there and a significant amount of investment and assets and tools and techniques that you can tap into.

[Rishi Chowdury, Co-Founder, Incube.] We've joined the CIP program really to understand a bit more about the industry and get access to more contacts within the space. It'd be great to also get some pilots out of it, network is really important for us we're excited to be here.

[Martin Freer] HSBC fund the program, providing financial support to the businesses. They fund the space that we have here that businesses can come and occupy at Tyseley Energy Park and they are funding the supporting program delivered by the Energy Systems Catapult.

[Rosie Griffiths, Creative Director, Olwg.] We joined the CIP programme because we really want help with the digital marketing side of things and how we can really bring the product to market and transition from where we are now to a good SAAS platform.

[Paul Jordan] Innovators need direct hands-on help, they need that business coaching, so we also have really experienced incubation managers in our energy launch launchpad accelerator and also get them ready for investment and start to link them into the investment community as well.

[Martin Freer] We are helping businesses through a whole variety of services and support programs. At the University we can help them develop through research and development their product, through the Energy Systems Catapult analyse their business proposition, we can help them develop IP and register IP, develop patents and we can help them with market analysis. Those are just some of the examples of the way that we can support businesses.

[Logo of Climate Innovation Platform. To find out more birmingham.ac.uk/energy/cip]

[Delivered by the University of Birmingham Energy Institute logo, in partnership with the Energy Systems Catapult logo.]

[Supported by HSBC UK logo and European Regional Development Fund logo.]

Ends