The management of all three Cornwall Innovation Centres is delivered by the University of Plymouth on behalf of Cornwall Council and has encouraged several collaboration opportunities between our Innovation Centres and the academic community within the university.
The Cornwall Innovation Centres have strongly engaged with a wide range of University of Plymouth undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students from different disciplines (i.e. Economics, Events Management, Entrepreneurship, Business Management, Computer Science, etc.) to help support them on their academic journey. This fosters an entrepreneurial mind-set through the provision of course-related projects and student employability opportunities amongst the 150 or so companies within the three Innovation Centres that prepare students for the start of their employment journey. This engagement ranges from a 12 months undergraduate placement opportunity aimed at supporting the Cornwall Innovation Centres with their business processes and marketing initiatives to accommodating student start-up support in the Formation Zone.
The Cornwall Innovation Centres have recently engaged University of Plymouth final year Events Management students in collaborative business-to-student projects as part of their coursework. This included a bespoke project surrounding the need to develop specialist event booking software that the students were able to research and recommend solutions.