This year our target is 10 Webster says

“This year our target is 10,” Webster says.A DigitalCity fellow, Sam Harrison, 26, is achieving some success with his company Animmersion, which offers virtual reality as well as animation. “We bring in mentors to take them the next step to develop their business plan.” Companies that get to this stage can find a home in the incubation unit In 2004-05, the DigitalCity Fellows created nine companies. “This enables us to nurture their talent and find out if they are able to work on an award-winning animation or another idea,” says Janice Webster, DigitalCity’s project director. The film, Emily and the Baba Yaga, based on a Russian folk tale, had strong characterisation and was meticulously made, the judges said.One way the university has been holding on to some of its most talented staff and students is through its DigitalCity Fellow programme Last year Teesside had 49 fellows. A film by two lecturers at the university won an international award for best animated film of 2005, beating the Wallace and Gromit blockbuster, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. When I met him, Fencott was about to take off for an international electronic entertainment exhibition in Los Angeles, where he was hoping to sell his unique piece of kit.But it is not just in computer games that Teesside is experiencing success. Fencott hired a graduate student at Teesside to help him, and for 18 months has been building a sophisticated piece of software in his office in the incubation unit.

“Having a business that would provide jobs for us was as big as my ambition got, but now our aim is to become a major player in the computer games industry.”Strange Agency was given £4,700 to develop its idea by the university’s Enterprise Development Programme and was then lent a further £90,000 by a venture capital company. Strange Agency is run by Clive Fencott, who came to the university to do a PhD and ended up spinning out an enterprise to test and assess computer games. Strange Agency has eight staff (three part-time).”It never occurred to me that this would make lots of money,” Fencott says. “We are trying to generate a knowledge economy in the North-east of England, including in rural areas.”The success of one company suggests that Teesside should be on its way to creating a busy hub of activity by 2010. Nisai employs about 40 Teesside graduates.”If the economy of the area grows and it’s an attractive place to come to, that’s going to have an indirect effect on recruitment and the health of the university generally – and it contributes to social wellbeing,” Smith says. In Hyderabad, they would train staff only to find them pinched by other companies.

Nisai, a digital-based learning company that concentrates on helping people who are excluded from learning, such as those who are ill and bedridden, has relocated to Teesside from Hyderabad in India to tap the local graduate market. It is also expected that the cluster of companies will attract businesses and graduates to the region.That’s already happening. Until now, Teesside alumni have hared off down the M1 to jobs in London. The hope is that, with a digital hotspot in Middlesbrough, students will stay. “Middlesbrough was built on enterprise and came into existence because iron ore was found in the Cleveland Hills and the Durham coalfield was nearby. Now we have to find new ways to exist and compete in the modern world.”One motive in creating DigitalCity was to retain graduates in the area.

Funded with European and Regional Development Agency money, it contains a number of digital enterprises, including Seed Animation, Amazing Interactives and Yuzu, which specialises in web design. The idea is that these companies will relocate to DigitalCity when it is ready and they are strong enough.For decades, the Americans have seen higher education institutions as engines of growth for local economies. That is now happening in Britain, as universities such as Teesside, egged on by the Government and regional agencies, take on a more energetic role in economic wellbeing.”As a university, we do research that’s about generating new ideas, but we also should be putting those ideas to use to create an economic base to fill the gaps left by shipbuilding, ICI and the like,” says Professor Mike Smith, deputy vice-chancellor. For some time now, students interested in computer games and animation have been flocking to its niche courses. The university has set up an incubation unit in a former Victorian school on campus that houses spin-out companies. And it will offer computing students suites for computer animation, computer-game art, design and programming, visualisation, graphics programming and digital music.It all capitalises on a strength Teesside University has been nurturing.