AN INITIATIVE coordinated by a Hampshire university to support entrepreneurs has been shortlisted for a prestigious award.

SETsquared was launched by the University of Southampton alongside a number of other institutes to support entrepreneurs leaving universities in their bid to create successful businesses.

And the partnership is now up for an accolade in the Higher Education Enterprise Champion category of the National Enterprise Educator Awards.

The partnership was launched with universities in Bath, Bristol, Exeter and Surrey, and is designed to help postdoctoral researchers make their business dreams a reality.

The Researcher to Innovator programme helps researchers without the necessary skills and knowledge to turn their projects into realities.

Entrepreneurs can gain mentoring and access to experts and investors to back their projects.

It has already scooped a number of awards, such as being named the top university business incubator in Europe and it has also been ranked as the second-best university business incubator in the world.

The current programme is being run for six months with graduates in a number of different disciplines and has helped more than 1,000 technology start-ups become a reality in the last decade.

That in turn has raised more than £1bn of investment, while the economic impact of SETsquared member companies has been estimated to be abound £3.8bn, creating 9,000 jobs and returning £7.3bn of investment back into the UK’s economy.

Some of the companies that have been helped and gone on to become successes in recent years include TruveInvivo, a Surrey-based firm that has developed ways of measuring the radiation dosage received by cancer treatment patients that recently won the Grant Thornton Entrepreneurial Excellence Award.

They also include Inductosense, which created a compact wireless sensing technology that can be installed in structure and products for low-cost monitoring.

Simon Bond, the innovation director for SETsquared, said: “We are truly honoured to be shortlisted for this award. Seeing the phenomenal success of the entrepreneurs we support is reward enough for us so this really is the icing on the cake.”

SETsquared will find out if it has won the award at a gala dinner and award ceremony, which will take place in Chelmsford on September 10.