At the conference, Innovate UK promoted its Five Point Plan, which has been developed in order to focus its efforts on targeting more scale-ups and creating an ecosystem of support for growing businesses.
Coutu commented: “It is essential that we take steps to allow the sharing of information about our scale-up companies, so that we can shine a spotlight on them and help them overcome the challenges to support their continuing growth.”
A scale-up company is categorised as growing more than 20% p.a. and having more than 10 full time employees. The Scale-Up Survey comes a year on from the release of the government-initiated Scale-Up report and will be used by the Scale-Up Institute to inform its work to close the scale-up gap.
Ruth McKernan, CEO of Innovate UK, said: “Small businesses are the engine room of the UK economy. Economic growth and enhanced productivity can be achieved by scaling up those small businesses to create the new jobs and industries of tomorrow.’
The Scale-Up Institute’s survey has also revealed the top three barriers to growth for British scale-ups: Building leadership capacity when growing fast; easy access to talent and the right skill sets from schools and graduate leavers as well as overseas; and attracting large corporate companies as customers both at home and abroad.
Coutu added: “If the details of our growing companies are shared by the government, both internally and externally, we will start to see these concerns addressed. The Five Point Plan we have seen from Innovate UK acknowledges that support for scale-ups is essential for economic growth in Britain and we anticipate that this plan will help close the Scale-Up gap.”
According to the survey, the benefits of closing the UK’s scale-up gap would include, in the short term, an additional 238,000 jobs and £38billion additional turnover within three years of reversing the scale-up gap; and in the long term, a potential of £225bn additional GVA and 150,000 net jobs by 2034.
Speaking at the conference, Business Secretary Sajid Javid said: “The UK is embracing new technologies and leading the world in innovation, but we must not be complacent and must look to the long term future of Research & Development to support our jobs and industries.”
He also revealed how a national panel of expertise to help direct funding and improve the outcome of public investment would secure the UK’s leading position, and invited applications from organisations up and down the country to conduct Science and Innovation Audits for their region.
“By taking stock of our assets and supporting best practice and expertise, we will propel the UK to the forefront of the global innovation race.”
