Networking, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Through targeted funding to the six universities within the partnership, this suite of activities facilitates innovation and pathways to translation and commercialisation. This initiative is called Innovation in Digital Health and Enterprise (IDEAs), promotes digital health leadership in the universities' business, enterprise and partnerships teams, and is run by Teesside University.

The aim is to establish digital health innovation projects and develop partnerships with external partners, to strengthen and inform the digital health offer in our region, to increase engagement with cross-sector partners, and to develop opportunities entrepreneurs in the regional health and care sector.

We are committed to providing support for engagement opportunities, and to provide access to state-of-the-art Incubator spaces located in highly interconnected environments such as the Newcastle Helix, the CAV (NU), and NHC (Tees), plus centres hosted by our universities and hub partners. Teesside and Newcastle Universities, in partnership with Innovation SuperNetwork and Umi, have organised networking workshops, events and presentations and panels at conferences to promote engagement.

Wider consortium symposia are run by Open Lab at Newcastle University in partnership with the six universities and hub partners to support networking and collaboration.

The IDEAs programme is led by Prof Vikki Rand and Emma Barron at Teesside University.

Supported by: Abigail Durrant, David Kirk, Katie French and Ruth Wilson, (Open Lab) Prof Boguslaw Obara (School of Computing), and Sarah Best and Melanie Thompson-Glen (National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise) at Newcastle University, Emma Batey and Matthew Lievesley at Northumbria University, Gillian Fricker (Innovation SuperNetwork for UMI), Dave Belshaw, Russ Watkins and Jodi Nichols at Health Innovation-North East North Cumbria, Philip Leigh (University of Cumbria), Chris Howell and Omar Al Janabi at Durham University, Yitka Graham at University of Sunderland, and Rob Wilson at Manchester Metropolitan University.