We have just found out that we have been approved to provide Innovation and High Growth Associate Adviser Services to Business Link Yorkshire.
Details of what the services offer are to follow.
Again this is another great endoresement for the quality of Design, Research and Business support Fripp Design and Research are providing to the Yorkshire and Humber region.
We went to the Sheffield launch of the new Yorkshire and Humber investment fund which supersedes SYIF and PIF. It is a £90M fund which offers three products:
Seedcorn Finance : £15K-£780K – The focus here is on technology pre/post Start Ups
Business Loans: £15K-£150K – The focus is on established business who need working capital/Capital support to grow their businesses
Equity Linked Finance:£100K-£2M – The focus on major capital investment and some larger start ups
The fund is available from April 2010, which is great news, however not all the fund manager contracts have been put in place so there maybe some delays.
All SME business sectors are eligible if based in the Yorkshire and Humber region.
We applaud this investment in helping entrepreneurs to develop world class businesses in our region. If we were to have one criticism, it is the cost of managing the fund, some £10M which represents 11% of the fund value…but we guess the fund managers will see an awful lot of ‘interesting’ investment opportunities in the next 3 years!
We’ve just had the opportunity to scan through the Ingenious Britain Report and we applaud My Dyson’s findings.
The UK has always prided itself in being a nation of Innovators (rather than the term more commonly used which is Inventors, which we consider to be a sub set of Innovation), however the reality is that India, China etc are rapidly closing the Innovation gap by the investment they are putting into education and the emphasis they put on hard skills (such as engineering which can be differentiated from soft skills such as marketing).
It is essential for the UK to remain ahead of the game and the future Government needs to take on board what Dyson says very seriously.
We consider ourselves as Innovators and this starts with the quality of the people working in our organisation.
We will shortly be announcing our results which will show a two and a half times increase in turnover and a doubling of overhead in the middle of the deepest recession in living memory.
We have a new team member; Abhijeet Patil who has joined our design team…and he holds a unique position in the company:
He is the first of our Designers not have got his Masters from Sheffield Hallam University!
Educated in India and the UK, Abhi brings enhanced engineering design skills and an international perspective of Design.
Welcome Abhi.
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