Do you have ideas for how to drive innovation diffusion amongst SMEs? Are you willing to put these to the test? The UK Business Department (BEIS) has launched the second round of the Business Basics Fund.
The fund has up to £2 million available for new projects focused on testing ways of encouraging SMEs to adopt existing technology and management practices and thereby boosting productivity. IGL and Nesta are delighted to be partnering with BEIS and Innovate UK to deliver the Business Basics Fund.
Funding is available to support projects that will be delivered in England. Further details on how to apply to this competitive fund can be found on the government’s website alongside further information on the fund objectives and outcomes from the first round.
Key Dates
5 March 2019
Evaluation masterclass webinar
7 March 2019
17 April 2019 12:00pm
Competition closes
24 May 2019
Invite to interview
5 June 2019
Interview panel
Contacts
If you have other questions or want to discuss ideas you think will fit with the Business Basics Programme, please contact: [email protected] or [email protected] in the BEIS Business Basics team.
If you need help finding a potential partner, please contact [email protected] by 5pm on 11 March 2019. Information on other organisations seeking a project partner can be found on our website.
James Phipps
James is Deputy Director at the Innovation Growth Lab (IGL).
Since joining IGL in 2016, James has overseen efforts to encourage policymakers to apply an experimental approach within innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth policy. He has worked with government ministries and innovation agencies around the world to develop and evaluate new ideas.
Notable projects include BEIS’s Business Basics Fund, where James was pivotal to the experimental approach that was used to test and explore many different ways of encouraging small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to take up productivity-boosting ways of working and technology.
Before joining Nesta, James was Head of Enterprise Policy Development and Evaluation at the UK Business Department, where he led research into the rationale and effectiveness of public support for entrepreneurship and business growth. He was also instrumental in the department becoming more experimental and rigorous in its evaluation, which included a range of policy experiments from small messaging trials through to the £30m Growth Vouchers Programme.