Global success for Hillington Park

A Glasgow innovation park has been named as one of the top 3 science-based incubators worldwide.

Hillington Park Innovation Centre was also ranked among the leading 10 centres of its kind in a prestigious survey.

The results came from a competition for the "Best Science Based Incubator Award 2004" organised by the Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services (CSES), based in England.

Judges assessed more than 25 incubators from 15 countries, in a major exercise which will culminate in a conference in Turin later this year.

The competition for the award consisted of a benchmarking exercise and a “Jury” meeting during which the quantitative data, analysed by CSES were combined with qualitative data based on the Jury members’ expertise on incubation processes.

Hillington Park was among the leading 10 centres based on a broad range of criteria, and took third place among the fastest-growing centres, just behind two similar centres in France and Italy.

Tom Ogilvie,Director of Hillington Park said: “When we set up the centre we were determined to provide the best possible environment for Scottish based innovators to develop world beating products and services.

“This latest achievement shows that we seem to have got the formula right.”

The Innovation Centre was set up four years ago and in that time 87 businesses have been set up with 31 moving on to bigger and better things.

So successful has the project been that a new company was set up last year to create a network of centres for early stage companies based on the Hillington model.

Last year the centre expanded its range of facilities with the launch of a Wireless Innovation project supported by Microsoft, T-Mobile, Agilent and Cisco.