Research Briefing Supporting Outdoor Businesses

Our Visiting Fellow, Leanne Townsend, is working with Gary Bosworth and other colleagues in EPIC to develop a COST Action Network on “Outdoor Entrepreneurship”.  We hosted a workshop in 2025 to help understand a range of opportunities and challenges in this sub-sector of the rural economy which helped us to prepare this briefing note.  The workshop also helped one of the participants, Simon Laing, to secure funding for an accelerator programme that supported 10 businesses in our region over the winter: https://www.northernlatitude.co.uk/consultancy/case-studies/growing-outdoors

As part of our continuing work in this field, we will be staging a follow-up workshop in Aberdeenshire over the winter.  This autumn, we also welcome a new PhD Student, Felix Bain to continue work in this field. She will be supervised by Leanne and Chris Hurst.

If any local businesses would like to work with us as we develop new research and seek to promote the sector within the regional economy, please do get in touch with the team.