Incubators for Design and Business at the RCA Battersea

On Monday, Christie's announced that it would sell a Francis Bacon painting owned by the Royal College of Art, with all the money made from the sale going towards a new Battersea campus for the college. We posted about it here. What is most interesting about the RCA expansion plans are the "start-up units for new businesses in the fields of art and design."

These "incubators" are part of Design-London at RCA-Imperial, a partnership of the RCA, Imperial College London's engineering department, and Imperial's Tanaka Business School, that was announced this summer. It's too early to say just how the incubators will work, but a spokesperson for the RCA told us that design, engineering, and business students coming out of Design-London might use them to flesh out ideas and launch companies. In theory, they could work like Y Combinator, an incubator for tech startups that has spawned Conde Nast-acquired Reddit, a social news site, and Scribd, a sort of YouTube for documents. Amongst its own famous alumni, the RCA includes Sir James Dyson of the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

The RCA expects to announce the director of Design-London at the end of the month. "I think he's going to change the way we think about design," the college's spokesperson said.