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8:17 am, October 21, 2008
One Central Park chiefs to step down
Chief executive David Auckland and chairman Tom Booth are stepping down from One Central Park in north east Manchester, a regeneration project which acts as an incubator for small businesses.
Professor Auckland, a former head of Campus Ventures at the University of Manchester, has been involved with the project since before it opened three years ago.
It has helped around 80 companies to get started, of which 40 remain, employing 120. They range from small start-ups which rent cheap flexible serviced office space to Plus Market listed business advisory firm Winning Pitch.
Prof Auckland will devote more time to his Innovation Lab venture, a small business advisory firm. He has also written a book in which he argues that entrepreneurship should be taught as though it was a performing art rather than an exact science.
He has been working two days per week at One Central Park but said the venture now needed a full-time chief executive to take it forward.
Moston-based One Central Park was set up by the universities of Manchester, MMU and Salford, further education college MANCAT and Manchester Science Park to promote new business growth in north east Manchester. It was built by Ask Developments with funds from the European Union, New East Manchester and the Northwest Regional Development Agency.
It has succeeded in helping new companies to get off the ground but hopes that the University of Manchester would take up space for spin-out companies and researchers has failed to materialise, partly because of the reorganisation following the merger with UMIST, which has freed up space closer to the main campus around Oxford Road.
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