The 2008 Budget announces that Anne Glover of Amadeus Capital Partners will “look into… the practicality of setting a goal for small and medium enterprises to win 30pc of all public sector business in the next five years”.
This is due to the crusading work by David Connell who has been the champion of importing the USA SBIR programme from the USA. SBIR forces government departments to allocate part of their annual budget to purchasing from SMEs. For example, a department funds research and then becomes the first customer as the business is spun out of the university. This provides customer engagement and non-equity funding (both key targets for entrepreneurs) and facilitates the establishment of rapidly growing businesses. One downside is that some companies live off these types of contracts and never develop but it takes all types to build a cluster.
It will be great when a budget announces a consultation on using equity in multiple investors in multiple rounds to build the key drivers of clusters, all based on the NESTA funded research using the business plan resource, Equity Fingerprint.
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