Innovation in the West Midlands
Innovation is commonly defined as 'the successful exploitation of new ideas'. In order to compete successfully, businesses must be innovative.
The West Midlands is rightly proud of its heritage as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, where innovation drove the change that would transform the world. The modern postal service originated here as did DNA profiling and LED technology and today our region has a number of examples of world-class research and development.
Companies like JCB and Jaguar-Land Rover are constantly innovating and competing on the global stage while our region is also home to world-class institutions such as QinetiQ, RAPRA and CERAM as well as powerful research facilities at the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick.
The West Midlands faces major challenges in innovation. It is estimated that in 2004, the West Midlands saw an investment of £21 billion on research and development, around 1.5 per cent of our region's GDP.
The Government has set an ambitious target for each English region to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on research and development by 2014, which would mean the West Midlands' annual spend would need to increase by £15 billion to £36 billion by 2014.
Support for businesses to become more innovative
There are many projects operating in the region for businesses seeking support to innovate their processes or products. The best way of accessing these is through the Business Link West Midlands who can signpost the current activities. Companies often perceive that innovation is risky and accessing finance from third parties can be important to enable innovation to happen. Advantage West Midlands has helped to establish a range of finance mechanisms to help businesses develop, these are available from the West Midlands Finance website (Opens in new window). R&D Tax Credits (Opens in new window) are an important route to raise levels of business Research and Development (R&D) and encourage business innovation.
Research and Development
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), its Technology Strategy Board and the Research Councils (Opens in new window), run various schemes to support research and development with universities that can lead to new products, processes and services.
The Small Business Research Innovation (SRBI) programme is a process that enables government bodies to connect with technology businesses, finding innovative solutions to specific public sector challenges and needs.
Run by the Technology Strategy Board, it uses the power of government procurement to accelerate technology development, supporting projects through the stages of feasibility and prototyping which are typically hard to fund. SBRI offers an excellent opportunity for businesses, especially early stage companies, to develop and demonstrate technology, supported by a customer, and to climb the first rung on the government procurement ladder.
The European Union Seventh Framework Programme (Opens in new window) (FP7) bundles all research-related EU initiatives together under one roof, playing a crucial role in reaching the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment. This offers a range of potential schemes to support R&D with European partners.
European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Programme 2007 - 2013
The West Midlands receives significant European Structural Funds through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Programme. Part of the Programme focuses on the theme of innovation which seeks to fund projects to stimulate demand for innovation from businesses, improve knowledge exchange with the universities, graduate entrepreneurship and demonstrator activity to stimulate innovation within supply chains.
More information on the ERDF Programme is available here.