Boost is a funded business support service that helps Lancashire business owners and leaders navigate the business support landscape to find the right support for their business. Our Business Support Spotlight series highlights the wealth of support listed on Boost’s Support Hub and available to Lancashire businesses.
Today’s spotlight shines on Edge Hill University's Productivity & Innovation Programme.
The Productivity & Innovation Centre helps established SMEs that are looking to create a coherent business strategy to scale-up and to identify and address the challenges that are preventing them from reaching their full potential.
Our fully funded Innovation Sprint Programme offers an intensive framework that uses the business data to stimulate the business into a period of high growth through the more effective use, allocation and tracking of resources.
We work with the decision-makers to build a strategy based on increasing their market share or through new product/service development. The numbers speak for themselves. Since 2018 the Productivity & Innovation Centre (PIC) has supported over 140 Lancashire SMEs in creating their scale-up strategies with an average growth achieved of 29%.
There are common issues that inhibit an organisations ability to scale-up. These issues often occur in one or more of four Parameters of Performance: Profitability, Demand, Productivity and Efficiency.
To be able to eradicate the issues, decision-makers need to spend time on their business, not just in their business. Our team of business experts work one-to-one with each business to help them gain a clear understanding of the issues before determining what changes to make.
By taking a deep-dive into the business data and asking often uncomfortable questions, our experts are able to guide the business through the programme’s framework using a series of highly effective business tools. SMEs who make the commitment and complete the six intensive online workshops, leave with a comprehensive financially feasible growth action plan.
Post-pandemic the key business strategy from the LEP continues to focus on stimulating SME growth. The PIC is a centre of excellence in the region and is recognised as a catalyst for change, stimulating growth and economic development through business innovation.
The programme helps businesses to maximise their performance through repeatable processes to help them to thrive. By stimulating business growth and supporting organisations to scale-up, we are also helping to create highly skilled employment opportunities for our talented graduates and future generations of young people.
The pandemic coupled with Brexit has impacted SMEs in many ways. Some organisations have been lucky enough to act quickly to diversify and thrive during this period. From the businesses that we work with, we are seeing some common issues and challenges, from disruption within supply-chains, inconsistent levels of profitability, blockages in productivity, additional costs in resources and changes in product or service demand.
This is a perfect time for SMEs to take a step-back and work to tackle their performance issues and develop a strategic plan to kick-start their period of scale-up growth. We are encouraging SMEs to take advantage of our fully funded support to help them on their growth journey. (This project is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund).
The continuation of collaboration across the region to support SMEs will help businesses to resurface and equip themselves with the capacity and capabilities to re-establish their growth potential.
Those who work to eradicate their performance issues and challenges to become resilient, will play a significant role in helping to develop Lancashire’s future economy. The Productivity & Innovation Centre is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund to provide innovation support and advisory services to Lancashire based SMEs. 
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