Get help on your innovation roller coaster ride!
Howard Partridge from Innovate UK shares his thoughts on innovation, and how Innovate UK can help you on a journey he calls a roller coaster.
Howard Partridge is the Innovate UK Regional Manager for the East of England. This means he works with local stakeholders, particularly the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), to understand, highlight and build upon the innovation strengths of the region. He shares his thoughts on innovation and how Innovate UK can help you on a journey he calls a roller coaster.
Innovation is about transforming your ideas and solutions to problems into something tangible that makes a real difference to people’s lives. That’s easy to say, but we know that overcoming the many technical challenges is just the start. You’ll need to engage with customers to test your ideas and solutions, with partners to produce it, and yet protect your ideas along the way. You’ll need to connect with customers who want your solution and if they buy it, you’ll need staff and production facilities to scale up and meet demand. That requires money at every stage and will present more challenges that you haven’t even thought of yet.
Innovate UK is here to help you on that innovation roller coaster! We can fund early-stage development with grants but, far more importantly, we have experienced advisers in our networks who’ve ridden that roller coaster. They can help you anticipate and plan to solve the challenges, to connect you with technical experts and the partners you might need, to protect your ideas and exploit them effectively, to market and sell overseas, and to prepare to pitch for the investment you’ll need to really grow.
Why do we do that? Society is facing many challenges; our population is getting older, it’s growing and travelling, putting pressure on the environment. We need to address those challenges to benefit everyone and there are potentially huge rewards for the companies and the counties that produce solutions, using the very latest technologies and artificial intelligence to harness data.
We are organising events across the UK so that you can meet us, meet people like yourself who’ve started their innovation journey, to learn first-hand how we can support and fund your ambitions, connect you to the experts who can help and advise you, and introduce you to the people who might invest in you and your business as it scales up.
Start your innovation journey at an Innovate UK event near you! The first upcoming events are:
East of England – Tuesday, 22 January 2019
South West of England – Wednesday, 30 January 2019
Yorkshire – Tuesday, 19 February 2019
Future event locations will also include London, the South East of England, the West Midlands and Scotland.
We hope to see you there! If you can’t attend, or want to find out more about how Innovate UK and our networks for enterprise and knowledge transfer can help you to ride the innovation roller coaster, visit the Innovate UK website.
Follow Howard (@HowardPeartree) and Innovate UK (@innovateuk) on Twitter.