Introducing our Innovation Programme
Innovation encompasses the development of new ideas, products, processes and services (no matter how big or small!) which deliver new approaches to challenges faced by businesses, individuals and communities.
Innovation is central to the Strategic Economic Plan’s long-term ambition to build a more productive North East: stronger innovation delivery will improve our productivity performance and catalyse growth in ‘better’ jobs
Here’s how the Innovation Programme links into the key areas of the Strategic Economic Plan:
We are curating an open innovation programme, Challenge North East, based on global best practice and drawing on existing regional strengths. Open innovation is fundamentally about collaboration with people and organisations. Our aim is to grow the culture of open innovation in the region to increase commercialisation and productivity.
We work with partners across the region, to identify and develop an evergreen pipeline of game-changing regional innovation projects. We support the pipeline projects to produce compelling and robust propositions which are best placed to attract national funding and grow the North East asset base.
Our aim is to accelerate investment into the region by winning a greater share of national innovation funding competitions and supporting private sector co-investment.
We support the cohesion of the North East innovation ecosystem in a variety of ways including through the development of emerging projects, providing support through steering groups, collaboration with the Business and Sector Growth team and the North East Growth Hub and engaging regional assets such as universities and catapults to foster collaboration and alignment.
With the North East LEP’s Business and Sector Growth team, we work with partners to lever private funding and have developed a roadmap for increasing the levels of private sector finance invested in the region’s innovative businesses, which is recognised as an area in which the North East falls behind the rest of the UK.
We are testing a novel concept of ‘Innovation Delivery Partnerships’ (IDPs) with regional partners to grasp opportunities in emerging markets in areas of regional strength. IDPs will be self-governing partnerships of businesses and organisations across the stages of innovation cycle. IDPs will focus on specific market opportunities and will support the growth of the North East’s competitive market share in these areas.
In this space we have developed an economic input-output model which calculates the potential economic impact of investment made across a range of innovation and business growth activities. This enables us to demonstrate the importance and benefit of public finding. At a pan-northern level, Innovation Director, Alan Welby, chairs the NP11’s Innovation Group.
Get in touch
If you want to know more about how the Innovation Programme can support your business, you can call us on 0191 561 5420 or email [email protected]