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Business Collaboration Networks

Helping businesses to work together to improve performance and exploit market opportunities

Purpose

To bring together businesses, to work on common challenges in fields of commercial activities that are essential for developing and strengthening regional economies.

How will this be achieved?

By providing a grant to set up and facilitate business collaboration that would:

• raise awareness of the benefits of collaboration;
• identify potential participants;
• facilitate a meeting based discussion forum on a specific topics;
• facilitate collaborative work groups on particular topics;
• recording and dissemination of discussion, information and conclusions reached by the group;
• facilitate inter-linking of similar collaborative groups in other parts of England.

Why offer public sector support?

There may be network externalities and spill-overs from collaboration and at the same time barriers to entering collaboration because:

• potential participants may be unaware of the benefits from collaboration;
• there may be problems internalising the benefits of the collaboration; and
• participants may not be able to agree how to divide up the benefits of collaboration (because they don’t know what the benefits are).

What will be offered?

The subsidy will be to intermediaries to facilitate bringing together groups of new and more established small or medium sized enterprises and relevant key partners in high growth, or sectorally important, or deprived areas to discuss commercial opportunities or ventures.

Who will be eligible?

Intermediaries – in general, private sector firms or organisations with relevant experience and a proven track record of successful facilitation of business collaboration. Network participants must centre around small-to medium sized firms to attract any public subsidy to the collaboration.

Interventions will be restricted to projects where:

• focus is on activities highlighted in Regional Economic Strategies;
• market failure and difficulty in achieving collaboration is identified at the project level;
• collaboration is necessary to develop and commercialise a business proposition that is outside the scope of supported activities elsewhere (e.g. under the ‘Innovation Collaboration’ product);
• business case demonstrates the absence of subsidy to participating large companies; and
• such networks will not support anti-competitive behaviour.

Interventions when they are time limited, will have a clear exit strategy established at project inception and will be at a proportionate level of subsidy. The exit strategies will establish how the benefits of collaboration will become apparent and the networks will be able to become self sustaining. Where benefits are not apparent then there will be no value in maintaining the network. In either case the networks can be expected to have a limited time in which government funding is necessary. Timing of exit would be determined by exit criteria and monitoring results.