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SME growth is vital for Oxfordshire’s economy Rod Macrae has been hearing about the business journey to achieving significant growth and why Oxfordshire is a great place to scale up a business. Written by: Rod Macrae Richard Byard of OxLEP
Oxfordshire has a world class university and research facilities as well as established worldleading science underpinning its business base and providing access to research, talent and data that can help address some of the major challenges facing Oxfordshire, the UK and indeed the globe. Many of the emerging transformative technologies that will shape this century have a home in Oxfordshire, such as the clean energy cluster spanning Harwell & Culham or world class life science capabilities centred around the Old Road Campus. SMEs can play a vital role in turning world class research into commercial opportunity and help address some of the challenges identified in the Local Industrial Strategy. For example, Tokamak Energy has grown rapidly from its origins in 2009 to a team of over 60 seeking to develop efficient and affordable clean fusion power. The strategy makes the case for small and medium sized businesses with significant growth potential: breakthrough and scale up businesses at the cutting edge of technological opportunity These scale-up businesses, many of them still at the early stages of development at present, could be major contributors to the future of Oxfordshire.
SUPPORTING GROWTH SMES Preparation is key for all businesses, but especially 86
those starting out on a growth journey – getting the basics in place so the business has the greatest chance of success – to scale and grow. OxLEP has recently launched eScalate, aimed at supporting and nurturing SMEs with high growth potential: companies which expect to scale-up in the near future or have found they are already facing the challenges of high growth – which can often happen at pace. One of the biggest obstacles is accessing the right sort of finance at the correct time, which can be complex and confusing with early stage and seed capital especially difficult. The eScalate programme offers support to enable businesses to be better placed to attract investment. The programme is providing access to vital resources and effectively connecting companies to the local eco-system.
We are putting in the “ groundwork and learning a lot from this stage. Our plan is to pivot to larger scale production when we launch into much larger markets and face greater demand
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Dr. Kashif Siddiq
As Richard Byard from OxLEP Business explains: “Businesses, regardless of their size, often face similar challenges when it comes to managing significant growth. Our aim is to provide a range of services that help businesses grow in a sustainable way, for example through leadership & management support, access to finance, skills and training support or to help access to networks and peer groups.”
START-UP TO SCALE-UP Kashif Siddiq has been managing director of Oxford RF Solutions for less than 6 months, but already knows what being an entrepreneur is all WWW.B4-BUSINESS.COM
