Money to help SMEs work with universities in Scotland

Funding opportunity

The Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council is making £100,000 available in an innovation scheme to help Scottish universities work with small to medium sized enterprises.

The money can be used to offset costs for a broad range of collaborative activities to support business growth, including developing new products, processes and services, improved production process, new business model development, technology audits or experimental testing and measuring.

The aim of the innovation scheme, which is modelled on similar programmes elsewhere in Europe, is to encourage new partnerships between universities and business.  

Universities can identify and approach SMEs themselves or use an intermediary to link up with businesses.  Each university can apply for £500 to £5,000, with the SME expected to match the Funding Council’s contribution.  

Mark Batho, Chief Executive of the Scottish Funding Council said, “Scotland’s universities have excellent research and academic expertise and it is important that we create new opportunities for them to exchange ideas and their knowledge with SMEs.  Other innovation schemes that are in place around the UK tend to focus on giving grants to SMEs to buy expertise from universities.  We wanted to turn this around and encourage universities to seek out SMEs to provide solutions for their business.  We see several benefits to this scheme; long-term business relationships are established and new products and processes will contribute to our economy.”