M Institute

Innovation gets boost in south-east

Is the Innovation Advisory Service message getting through to medium companies? M Institute correspondent Joe Lickens investigates.

The Innovation Advisory Service, one of several business support initiatives funded by the South East England Regional Development Agency (SEEDA), was launched eighteen months ago and is highly regarded by those who have used it. However, it suffers from a lack of exposure: excellent the service may be, but companies need to have heard of it before they can take advantage of it.

Managed by Oxford Innovation and partnered with the National Physical Laboratory and CLIK (the technology transfer arm of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), the IAS offers free or heavily subsidised support to companies of all sizes. However, so far, it appears to be predominantly small companies that seek help.

Claiming to act as a catalyst for growth for its clients, the IAS aims to help companies identify what to do, how to do it and how to gain access to resources and funding. Support is designed for companies that have an innovative service with which they want to move forward but for which they do not have the necessary resources.

To grow or not to grow - that's an IT question

Durham Business School and Microsoft (both partners of M Institute) have collaborated on a piece of research that has an important finding: growing companies make greater use of IT to meet their key business challenges compared to companies that are declining. M Institute co-founder Jyoti Banerjee investigates.

The research, carried out among 401 businesses with up to 100 employees, does not attempt to distinguish cause from effect. But it does claim that growing companies are more likely to invest in IT in order to better manage customer data, better manage business processes, comply with regulation, and access business information when out of the office.

Although much of the report is focused on analysing the different size cohorts, its writers, Bill Snaith and Ian Stone of Durham, have done an interesting thing in maintaining a constant thread in the report which analyses the research findings by growth performance. Compared to declining companies, growing companies are more likely to:
* Use more diversified sources for IT advice
* Have more software and arguably more sophisticated systems 
* Have more appreciation that IT can (and has) delivered benefits to their business and how it might help them overcome challenges
* Talk about IT in terms of what it can do for employees, and so have a people-centric attitude to IT
* Display greater willingness to spend more on IT in future to generate competitive advantage and growth