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LATEST UMIP SPIN-OUT NEWS STORM® SKILLS TRAINING CIC A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE We assisted Dr. Gill Green from the Institute of Population Health to launch STORM® as a Community Interest Company (CIC). STORM® (Skills-based Training on Risk Management) is a skillsbased model of self-harm mitigation training. STORM® began as a research project in the mid 1990s to test the effectiveness and feasibility of a suicide prevention training programme created by Professor Linda Gask and Professor Richard Morriss. In 2003, Professor Gask and Dr. Green created the STORM® Project, a not-for-profit venture within the University, which has successfully disseminated STORM® training to provider organisations in the UK and internationally. The STORM® Project has also created new IP from its research, creating a self-injury mitigation module to form a complete selfharm mitigation training package. As a result of this success, STORM® Skills Training CIC has been incorporated. "From a solid foundation and a well-established brand we are now moving on and are looking forward to building the business further with increasing revenues to fund our social impact work in the community," explains Dr. Gill Green. STORM® Skills Training CIC offers training to frontline staff and volunteers across all industry sectors, including healthcare, social care, education and criminal justice services. The training is also aimed at staff with responsibility for the mental health and wellbeing of the workforce, such as those working in Human Resources and Occupational Health. Dr. Green commented: "Setting up STORM® as a Community Interest Company in this way is quite unique, and it is thanks to colleagues within the University and UMIP, and the incredible support from UnLtd, DLA Piper and Ernst & Young that we have reached this milestone. As a notfor-profit Social Enterprise, STORM®'s mission is to challenge the fear of mental illness and distress, and to encourage open and honest lines of communication for people who are in psychological pain to access help and support." Green leading up to this event, and we are confident that configuring STORM® as a Social Enterprise is the right model to progress this activity. Gill and the team will ensure STORM® CIC is able to re-invest its surplus into complementary areas such as suicide postvention and emotional distress, to maximise the impact of this training approach. We now look forward to helping other colleagues from the University who wish to apply their research outputs in this way." www.stormskillstraining.co.uk Rich Ferrie, Director of IP Commercialisation and Head of UMIP, commented: "UMIP has worked closely with Dr Gill On Thursday 1st November, STORM® Skills Training CIC celebrated its launch at an event hosted by UnLtd and DLA Piper at their Manchester office. 2-DTech Ltd moves into Innovation Centre 2-DTech, University spin-out and supplier of fully- characterised, high quality graphene and other 2D materials, has just moved into high specification laboratories at the University's Innovation Centre (UMIC). Located at the centre of the hub where graphene was isolated in 2004 by Professor Sir Andre Geim and Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov, 2-DTech is committed to helping customers make use of graphene's extraordinary properties which have the potential to revolutionise many technologies. 2-DTech can work with customers' research teams on a partnership basis, exploring possible uses of graphene or can act in a consultancy capacity, undertaking research and development on customer's behalf. 2-DTech are also happy to test and analyse customers' own research work as well as supplying fully characterised graphene and other 2D materials from the product store on their website which will be launched in January. telecoms and defence. Further information about 2-DTech will be released in early 2013. Graphene's applications are virtually limitless. Sectors to which graphene is particularly suited include electronics, aerospace, automotive, energy, 7

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