Forums
Industry Forums
UON’s Northamptonshire industry forums are designed to support businesses across the board in all sectors. These forums provide peer-to-peer support for businesses from start-ups to large companies. All forums are open to those who want to share knowledge and best practice, ask for advice, and work together on challenges within their industry. At the heart of the forums is UON’s ambition to explore ways in which it can support your business in a variety of ways including:
- Supporting Your Recruitment and connecting with the future workforce e.g., student placements and work experience, graduate recruitment, engaging with careers fairs, guest lectures
- Knowledge Exchange and supporting innovation, e.g., Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, Academic Consultancy, Industry Projects, Research
- Commercialisation, e.g., CPD, IP advice, UON facilities and equipment
Our industry forums provide you with the opportunity to:
Network and collaborate
Our forums bring together experts, stakeholders, and enthusiasts from across various sectors. Connect with like-minded people, potential collaborators, and potentially mentors to build relationships. Collaborate on local issues, challenges, projects, and business opportunities.
Share knowledge
These forums aim to facilitate the exchange of industry news, insights, best practices, events, and experiences among professionals. This sharing of knowledge helps members stay updated on the latest trends, technologies, regulatory changes, and strategies.
Access to UON expertise, facilities, and resources
Collaborating with us can help your organisation to grow. We can offer you a wealth of expertise, new perspectives, top-class facilities, and support to access a range of funding streams.
Northamptonshire sits at the heart of the UK’s logistics network, within the area often referred to as the Midlands “Golden Triangle”. Its central location, strong road connections and access to key routes including the M1, A14 and A45 make it one of the country’s most important locations for warehousing, distribution and freight movement. Northamptonshire is home to a number of major logistics parks including Brackmills Industrial Estate, Swan Valley, the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal (DIRFT), Segro’s Northampton Gateway, Prologis Park Pineham, Panattoni Park Northampton, Warth Park Raunds, GLP’s Magna Park Corby and Prologis Park Kettering.
The logistics sector is a major contributor to the Northamptonshire economy, supporting jobs, investment and business growth across the county. The Northamptonshire Logistics Industry Forum was established to bring together employers, local government, education providers and other partners with an interest in the future of the sector.
The Forum provides a collaborative, non-competitive space for the industry to share insight, identify common challenges and work together on practical solutions. Its focus includes infrastructure, skills, innovation, sustainability, workforce development and the promotion of logistics careers to young people.
The Forum aims to:
- Support the continued growth of the logistics sector and its contribution to jobs, prosperity and economic development in Northamptonshire.
- Encourage collaboration between logistics businesses and partners in a non-competitive environment.
- Gather and share sector intelligence, insight and best practice.
- Provide regular updates, networking opportunities and forums for discussion.
- Promote logistics careers to young people, including through work placements, industry talks, projects and links with education.
- Support the development of skills provision and courses that reflect the needs of the sector.
- Provide a collective voice for logistics in Northamptonshire, ensuring that the sector’s needs are understood by local authorities, government and other key stakeholders.
- Explore new ways forward in response to environmental, technological and strategic change.
The Northamptonshire Logistics Industry Forum is chaired by Clare Bottle, Chief Executive of the UK Warehousing Association. Clare has worked in logistics since 1994 and is a recognised advocate for the warehousing and logistics sector at local, regional and national level.
Clare’s role as Chair of the Northamptonshire Logistics Industry Forum reflects her commitment to strengthening the voice of the sector and helping Northamptonshire build on its identity as a nationally significant logistics hub. In this capacity, Clare also sits ex officio on the Northamptonshire Growth, Innovation and Productivity Board, co-chaired by Mike Reader MP, ensuring that logistics is represented in wider county-level discussions about investment, productivity, skills and economic growth.
This forum is currently being reviewed.
This forum enables those in the manufacturing sector to share information and best practice on a wide range of related topics. Previous meetings have included focus on lean and innovation, productivity and culture. Our forum moves around the County and meetings often incorporate a factory tour to enable attendees to see manufacturing across industry
Aims:
- To ensure that the sector works collaboratively to identify and address industry issues in collaborative non-competitive environment
- Share information and best practice to progress the sector and organisations within the sector
- Support innovation and knowledge exchange across the sector
- Provide regular information updates and opportunities to meet
- Promote the sector to young people and the range of opportunities within the sector – supporting and offering work placements, projects, industry talks and relevancy to courses
- Helping the sector to grow further, faster and deliver increased jobs, prosperity, and social inclusion for Northamptonshire
- Support & collate themes and data to support business support and development of skills & courses for the sector
- Working closely with Make UK and others provide a collective voice for the sector and its interests, ensuring that the needs of the sector are understood, communicated to key audiences such as local authority and Government and effectively responded to.
The current Chair of The Northamptonshire Manufacturing Forum is Jolene Spall. Jolene is Operations Director for Whitworths Ltd. Whitworths are a dried fruit, nut home baking and snack company based in Irthlingbrough and they employ around 300 people.
Jolene is passionate about the sector and had supported the forum for a number of years before taking over as Chair.
This forum is currently being reviewed.
This forum is currently being reviewed.
If you would like to become a member or to find out more, please get in touch.
