Change is afoot at Sussex Innovation. After 24 years of serving the region’s disruptive start-ups and academic innovators, the business incubator is restructuring from within to offer more intensive support for the most impactful businesses in Sussex and the South East.

Two recent promotions from within the consultancy team are driving the organisation’s new mission, with Claire Pasquill and Helena Jevons stepping into the roles of Head of Programmes and Head of Sales and Marketing respectively. The coaching team is also expanding, with a host of new associate coaches providing specialist expertise.

“My focus as Head of Programmes is to develop the services that will deliver on our new mission,” says Claire. “We are supporting driven, ambitious start-ups and scale-ups who want to have true impact. I feel determined that our new programmes will be full of actionable insight and practical tools for people who want to have serious impact, at scale.”

“Feedback and data-driven decision making are really important to us,” continues Helena. “We’re conducting the largest ever survey of scale-ups in the region, so that we can get tangible insights into the local entrepreneurial experience.

“Our founder and associate coaches bring a new flavour to the team, from exited founders who have scaled and sold multimillion-pound businesses, to dynamic coaches with years of industry experience delivering major organisational change, strategy and efficiency projects. We can now offer access to a diverse team who have first-hand experience of the entrepreneur’s journey and can give straight-talking advice to the next generation of ambitious founders in Sussex.” 

Who’s who at Sussex Innovation?
Claire Pasquill has led teams and mentored individuals for well over 20 years. As managing director of an event consultancy, she took the business from the brink of bankruptcy by building and motivating teams to drive the income of the company to £1.8 million within a year.

Helena Jevons has over 20 years’ commercial experience in FMCG, electronics, SaaS and retail. She has held senior marketing and commercial roles for HJ Heinz, Premier Foods, and GSK amongst others, leading European factory consolidation projects and global product innovation as well as time as the Managing Director of an early stage machine learning Start Up raising £2.4m in private investment.

Helena is a commercial strategist who combines her extensive project and product management expertise with a keen interest in the dynamics of branding and positioning to help business owners develop a product-market fit and successfully follow through on their vision.

The New Associate Coaches
Hilary Duggan is an MCIPD qualified organisational change and leadership specialist, with more than ten years’ experience leading projects and teams. As Head of People and Performance Development and then Organisational Design and Development Lead at Ingeus, she worked across a group of international businesses to deliver successful organisational growth and change.

Hilary holds degrees in Psychology and Personnel Development, as well as diploma in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She specialises in coaching and developing leaders and leadership teams to help define and deliver their change agenda, and establish the right mindsets, competencies, and practices to deliver their strategy.

Allisyn James mentors individuals to achieve their potential. She’s all about the ‘consumer at heart’; constantly fascinated by people and the way they think, feel and behave.

Allisyn specialises in growth strategy and business capability, and is passionate about organisational culture. She has held senior VP positions from both client and agency side, using her experiences with the likes of Safeway, GSK and Cadbury Schweppes to help shape the agenda and then deliver the future for everyone from small businesses to multinationals.

Emma Mills-Sheffield became a business consultant having spent 15 years in industry leading major pursuits, sales efficiency projects, virtual PMOs and process improvements, training delivery programmes, workshop facilitation and coaching. She’s done this with KPMG, WSP and in the creative and digital industries and has experienced working with public sector organisations, FTSE100 and Fortune500 companies.

Emma helps businesses drive efficiency and productivity by reviewing business operations and investing in their people. She gets the best out of organisations by developing happier and more productive workforces. In January 2020 she was named as one of 100 female entrepreneurs in the UK as part of the small business campaign f:Entrepreneur.

This is a snapshot of the interdisciplinary team of coaches who are available to collaboratively consult with selected scale-up businesses as part of Sussex Innovation’s new Task Force service.

Interested in taking a step back from your business and redefining your priorities for 2020? 

Find out more by visiting info.sinc.co.uk/enquiries and telling us more about your business. A limited number of Task Force briefings will be available on a fully-funded basis.