We are delighted to have been commissioned to work with Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership to develop a round four Regional Growth Fund bid for Northamptonshire’s high performance technology sector.
Following on from providing support for their successful round three application, we were asked to help the Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership prepare a bid for round four of the Regional Growth Fund.
The Regional Growth Fund is the one of the Government’s main tools designed to help stimulate economic development and growth. The first three rounds allocated a total of £2.4 billion of funds which it is hoped will lever over £13 billion of private sector investment and create or safeguard over 500,000 jobs. A call for applications for a fourth round of funding totalling £350m was launched in January 2014 by the Deputy Prime Minister.
Our brief was to support NEP with the detailed design of their programme and prepare an appraisal of its likely outputs and outcomes. The application was designed to complement the round three grant which will provide support to SMEs in the high performance technology sector seeking to invest in exports, small-scale R&D and new equipment that will facilitate growth and new product development. The round four programme was therefore focussed on providing support to companies that require finance to invest in major innovative R&D projects that would quickly exhaust the level of funds available from the round three grant.
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