How universities shape entrepreneurial ecosystems: Lessons from Manchester Metropolitan University

What role should a university play in a crowded entrepreneurial ecosystem?

Jennie Shorley, Academic Director of the Centre for Enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Rob McKay, Senior Lecturer in Enterprise Practice, explain how universities can strengthen the connections between businesses, public bodies, and sources of expertise.

Their experience in Greater Manchester highlights the value of trust, navigation, honest institutional boundaries, and a shared regional purpose.

You can listen to the conversation on our podcast or read the summary below:

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Summary

Entrepreneurial ecosystems can contain an abundance of programmes, agencies, investors, businesses, and universities, yet still leave founders unsure where to turn. For Jennie Shorley, Academic Director of the Centre for Enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Rob McKay, Senior Lecturer in Enterprise Practice at the university, the value of an ecosystem depends on the relationships that connect its parts. A university contributes most when it knows its distinctive strengths, helps people navigate the wider landscape, and builds trust that lasts beyond individual funding schemes.

Greater Manchester provides a demanding setting for that work. The city-region spans ten local authorities, includes four universities, and combines dense urban areas with significant rural communities. Manchester Metropolitan University has around 40,000 students and deep vocational roots, while its role has expanded across research, innovation, policy, skills, and business engagement. Jennie and Rob’s experience shows how a university can turn that reach into shared regional value without assuming that it should do everything itself.

Begin with a shared regional purpose

Manchester Metropolitan University describes itself as being of and for the city. Its graduates work across the region, while its academics contribute to health, education, science, business, and public policy. That identity helps align its activity with the Greater Manchester strategy of improving citizens’ lives.

This shared purpose gives collaboration a direction. Business support and entrepreneurship become routes towards better jobs, stronger organisations, and a place where people want to live and remain. It also changes how a university understands impact. Commercialisation, spin-outs, patents, and technology transfer matter, but they capture only part of the value created when knowledge, talent, and relationships move through a region.

The Centre for Enterprise has a defined role within that larger system, concentrating on small businesses and entrepreneurial activity. Other institutions and parts of the university bring different strengths, including work with large companies or specialist technologies. Rob sees this clarity as essential: a functional ecosystem depends on organisations understanding where they can contribute and how their capabilities complement those of others.

Purpose also provides a basis for deciding which opportunities to pursue. External funding can pull teams in many directions. Jennie argues that universities must remain clear about what they do well and what their communities genuinely need. Regional priorities should shape support for businesses and entrepreneurs.

Build trust before the funding arrives

Long-term partnerships rarely begin with a contract. Rob has found that the relationships most likely to continue after a project are already developing before funding becomes available. People have begun to understand one another’s interests, capabilities, and ways of working, creating a foundation that a funded opportunity can strengthen.

The relationships that have endured beyond a particular funding opportunity have been the ones where the relationship has been nascent before the money arrived on the table.

That trust allows partners to discuss their needs openly. Jennie notes that universities can be reluctant to state what they require from a business relationship, even when engagement targets, evidence of impact, or private-sector co-investment are conditions of the funding. Productive partnerships start with clarity about what each party hopes to gain and what each must contribute.

Relationships also generate value after a formal programme ends. Businesses may return for different support, contribute through an industry board, introduce partners, or maintain links with students and researchers. The Centre for Enterprise’s academic and professional services colleagues operate as one team, shortening the route from initial engagement to specialist expertise.

Rob describes many members of the team as outward-facing ecosystem navigators. Their value lies partly in knowing people and understanding how the system works. As professionals move between universities, public bodies, and other organisations, they carry tacit knowledge, trust, and relationships with them. This social capital helps formal structures work in practice.

Make a crowded ecosystem easier to navigate

Greater Manchester’s scale creates both opportunity and friction. A business can encounter multiple agencies, government bodies, universities, and programmes with overlapping offers. Jennie has seen how choosing between them can become a task in itself, particularly for a founder entering the ecosystem for the first time.

The answer is not a single universal gateway. Manchester’s collaborative approach is captured in a more flexible principle:

Rather than having one front door, there’s no wrong front door.

For that principle to work, the organisation receiving an enquiry must guide the business towards the right help. Rob compares the role to that of a guide through a complicated landscape: someone who can interpret different offers, understand a company’s needs, and make a trusted introduction. A referral can be the intervention that enables a founder to progress.

Navigation must also account for exclusion. Strong networks can be difficult to enter for people who lack existing connections or who do not fit the assumptions built into conventional programmes. Jennie points to neurodivergent entrepreneurs whose ways of learning and engaging may not suit a traditional accelerator. An ecosystem’s density is therefore an incomplete measure of its strength; access depends on whether its relationships and programmes can accommodate different participants.

Physical proximity still helps. Businesses unfamiliar with universities can gain confidence from visiting a campus and meeting people in person. Rob stresses that trust cannot be built entirely through a screen. Yet specialist expertise may sit outside a funding boundary, and some firms will choose a partner for its capabilities. Effective navigation combines local knowledge with the flexibility to connect people further afield.

Treat innovation as a human and social process

Jennie and Rob resist the assumption that business growth begins with a tool or a piece of technology. Companies can feel pressure to adopt the latest innovation, while universities can frame knowledge exchange as a product to be transferred. The Centre for Enterprise begins by examining the organisation’s needs, readiness, market, and intended outcomes.

We see innovation and business growth as primarily human and social processes to start with.

Rob sometimes sees the university’s role as slowing a business down deliberately. Small firms often want to act quickly, but may not yet have asked who they are creating value for, which problem they are solving, or what gap they intend to address. Reflection can prevent a company from investing in an unsuitable solution and help it move forward with greater stability.

Leadership and management development is part of that support. Experienced business owners may have succeeded without formal leadership education or a clear account of why. Programmes framed around growth give them space, peer relationships, and concepts to make their practice more deliberate.

Students can bring a fresh perspective to a problem that a business has viewed from the same angle for years. In return, they gain experience of real organisational challenges. Feedback from businesses also flows into teaching, creating a reciprocal connection between enterprise support and education.

Collaborate through honest boundaries and broader measures

Strategic collaboration requires institutions to say both where they can contribute and where they cannot. Rob contrasts this with partnerships in which organisations attend because their status suggests they should be present. Greater Manchester’s more functional relationships are built around a clearer question: what does each participant bring?

I think that the strength here that others can look to is this approach to collaboration that’s built on honesty and transparency.

This discipline helps universities resist the temptation to compete across every area. Manchester Metropolitan University’s focus on small firms can complement another institution’s strength with large businesses. Joint funding bids become more credible when partners acknowledge those differences. Rob nevertheless identifies a remaining gap between the small-business and corporate parts of the ecosystem, where stronger links could help ideas, suppliers, and spin-outs move between organisations of different sizes.

The same honesty should extend to measurement. Jennie argues for a longer and wider view of impact than the activity immediately visible to the university. Meaningful indicators might trace contributions to better jobs, a more attractive region, or people’s decision to stay, even though such outcomes take years to emerge and cannot always be attributed neatly to one institution.

We have to have a kind of wider, longer view of what impact actually is than what’s in front of our noses.

The experience of Jennie Shorley and Rob McKay suggests that a university shapes an entrepreneurial ecosystem by making its connections more useful, accessible, and purposeful. Its contribution becomes credible when institutional ambition is translated into patient relationships, thoughtful guidance, complementary roles, and measures tied to the wellbeing of the place it serves.

Ready for more?

Universities can strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems by connecting regional actors, reducing complexity and helping businesses reach the right support.

Explore these resources on building accessible, connected and place-based entrepreneurial ecosystems:

• Our case study collection How to build thriving innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems explores how universities and regional partners can connect expertise, finance, infrastructure and support around the specific needs of their communities.
• Our brief Designing university-SME collaboration that actually works explains how clearer entry points, trusted intermediaries and lower-friction pathways can make university engagement more accessible to smaller businesses.

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