“It’s all about grant funding”: Busting the big myth about how Innovate UK helps ambitious businesses scale

Thanks to Tara Gillam, Manager of Innovate UK Business Growth operations in the South West, for this guest blog.

Innovate UK is best known for its grant competitions where it has invested more than £2.5bn since 2004, leveraging at least £4.3bn of associated private sector investment. 

The results from these investments are staggering. A 2023 Oxford Brooks study found that for every £1 invested by Innovate UK, the UK economy grows by £6.21. 

However, the support extends far beyond grant funding, and reaches far more businesses than those fortunate enough to be awarded grants. 

Through its Innovate UK Business Growth service (formerly known as Innovate UK EDGE), it provides game-changing, 1-2-1 support that’s funded and bespoke to each business. 

I head up this service in the South West and lead a highly specialised team focused on helping our regional innovators overcome barriers to growth and create tangible market value.

We can help you to become investment ready, revamp your IP and business strategies, internationalise, boost sales through new marketing initiatives, introduce customer-centric design principles and much more. 

With specialists in all these areas, we can help you with most of the problems you’re likely to face as a scaling business, as Lloyd Peto, Commercial Director of Bristol-based NanoScope Services explains: 

“When you work for a large company, you can just wander up the corridor and have a chat with an expert in any area you’re struggling with.

“But we’re a team of three and we can’t be brilliant at everything so having that specialist support from Innovate UK Business Growth has been excellent.

Here’s a quick look at just some of the areas we can help you with:

As a dedicated team of six, our funding and finance division takes time to understand your business, it’s needs and timescales, creating an action plan that works for you. 

As specialists in this sector, they can identify finance options that you hadn’t considered or perhaps weren’t even aware of. According to the British Business Bank’s Small Business Finance Market Report, the number one barrier to accessing external finance is an unfortunate lack of understanding of all the finance opportunities available to small businesses.

We can help you bridge this knowledge gap by analysing grant opportunities and providing critical appraisal of applications, recommending debt options and helping you to become investment ready.

For instance, our Invest-Ability programme provides intensive support for both early-stage and more mature companies with workshops and events including pitches in front of real investors. Here you build important investor relationships and get essential feedback on how to improve.

Helping innovation-led businesses to scale overseas and improve the UK’s standing in the global economy is key to Innovate UK’s aims. 

It’s why we run the Global Business Innovation Programme (GBIP) which selects innovators in a particular sector or technology area and takes them to a market of strategic importance, where they can explore new opportunities and find partners for collaboration. 

The three-stage intensive programme includes pre-and-post-visit support, helping businesses to practice their pitch and understand cultural nuances, and then capitalise on the connections made out in-country. 

To see what the programme looks like in practice, watch this video from our Semiconductors GBIP to Taiwan in 2023. You can also see all our upcoming GBIP opportunities here. 

Our internationalisation support also extends far beyond the GBIP. We can provide bespoke market research/intelligence insights, help you find highly specialised partners, suppliers and customers through the Enterprise Europe Network Partnering Opportunities, and explore further opportunities through our Global Incubator Programme. 

One of our core focuses is to help you turn your R&D hard work into tangible market value. That could be through a revamped lean manufacturing process, a new business strategy, a refresh in product design, or a revised approach to HR. 

Jake Biele, CEO, Light Trace Photonics, worked with our marketing specialists to boost sales for their photonics devices: 

“Our marketing specialist helped us turn a single landing page into a full website, refining our customer journey and improving our SEO so we could rank higher on Google. It’s really helped with our sales pipeline.”

We can also help through a £2,250 IP Audit grant, delivered in conjunction with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), to subsidise an IP audit carried out by an IP professional of your choice.

Tom Birbeck, CEO of ARC Marine, commented: “IP is the backbone of what we’re raising investment on, and we’ve secured funds that wouldn’t have been possible without the IP audit.” 

Alternatively, we can offer grants to access the Catapult Network and other RTOs, and connect you with our contacts at universities, the BSI, laboratories (e.g. NPL) and Innovate UK Business Connect. 

Of course, there’s a lot of options there and navigating which routes are right for you can be challenging. That’s why we ascribe you with a dedicated innovation and growth specialist who can help you to take stock of where you are, create an action plan for where you need to be, and draft in the right specialists to help you get there. 

Ben Caton, Managing Director of Ergochair, explains: 

“As that central point of contact with a breadth of knowledge and experience, our innovation and growth specialist was invaluable. He understood our business and could connect us with the right specialists at the right time.” 

If you have ambitions to scale your business, leverage R&D, reach new markets or fuel growth through funding, then you don’t have to do it alone. Our funded specialists are on hand to help fill knowledge gaps, brainstorm new ideas and find a clearer path through all the uncertainty. 

You can reach out to us here to get started.