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Scottish Enterprise generates more than £700m planned innovation activity

Today we want to share with you a successful case from our members of Scotland. This case shows how investing in local SMEs can generate wealth in the region.

Scottish Enterprise’s support is forecast to generate £709.74 million of Scottish innovation expenditure. The agency approved £120m in grant funding and equity investment for innovation activities in the 2021-22 financial year, which is now calculated to deliver a further £502m innovation investment from the private sector as well as £86m from the public sector partners. A total of 260 projects are being supported, delivering an impressive array of innovations from private firms developing solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges, to new spin-outs from our world-leading universities, and vital infrastructure in the form of Scotland’s first-class innovation centres.

Supported projects include

  • Australian inward investor BigTinCanannounced plans to expand its Glasgow software development centre to accelerate a series of R&D projects, following confirmation of a funding package from a Scottish Enterprise worth £1.4m. BigTinCan specialises in developing software for use by companies’ salesforces to help improve their customers’ experiences
  • University of Edinburgh life sciences spin-out Kynos Therapeuticsannounced that it had raised £9m in growth funding, including investment from Scottish Enterprise. The company is developing a treatment to help regulate the immune system and protect patients against tissue damage caused by a mitochondrial enzyme known as KMO
  • Scottish Enterprise announced a grant award of £2.5m to Scotch whisky maker North British Distillery. The funding will allow the company to develop and deliver a modernised distilling process, to significantly reduce its carbon footprint
  • Scottish Enterprise also continued its funding support as a partner of Scotland’s many innovation centres, including the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics at Glasgow’s Strathclyde University, the Advanced Forming Research Centre (AFRC) in Renfrew, the Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC) in Aberdeen, and the CENSIS centre for sensing, imaging and the internet of things (IOT) at the University of Glasgow.

Adrian Gillespie, Chief Executive of Scottish Enterprise, said: “Scottish companies are innovating to create greater opportunities for a more prosperous future, as well as delivering solutions to global challenges in areas like climate change, advanced manufacturing and life sciences. It’s great to see a sustained appetite among our business base to continue investing in innovation despite the current headwinds, while at the same time, the private and public sectors continue to invest significantly in our first-class innovation centres. These activities will ensure Scotland remains a leading innovation nation.”

One mechanism through which Scottish Enterprise helps companies innovate is its SMART: Scotland grant. Research by Scottish Enterprise recently revealed the impact of SMART by taking a snapshot of the cohort from 2015/16 and tracking its progress since then, in terms of survival and further investment. The study revealed that of the 76 SMART recipients that year, 60 companies (80%) are still trading. A total of £156.9m equity investment was raised by the cohort since the time of the grant award, with four companies raising more than £10m each. Innovate UK grants totalling £14.6m have also been awarded to 25 cohort companies since 2015, with five companies raising more than £1m each.

For us is always a pleasure to stand out how countries and regions succeed with the cooperation of regional actors like Scottish Enterprise. Read more news about our members here.