Grant Applications – Creating Maximum Leverage for Growth
Grant Application forms are a black art to some people. A world of bureaucracy, frustrating and time consuming with sometimes little return for the effort put in.
However, grant money is a great way to support micro and small companies get through to “adulthood” and once you get into the rhythm of what is needed it can become easier and more successful.
The first thing to do is to understand where you actually want your company to grow and develop over the next 3 years or so. Then identify what activities that are already in your plan can be naturally shaped into projects that have the potential for grant funding. If you are stretching the definitions to make it fit, then it is unlikely to be successful.
Grants are there to support
- increased revenues, especially export revenues
- new job roles and to safeguard existing employees
- bring in additional revenues to government through business rates
- innovation and the creation of new IP.
And increasingly to allow companies to transition to Net Zero, Zero Waste, Circular Economy and to meet Sustainable Development goals.
They do this through part-support of projects that enable expansion of premises, access to new equipment, support of staff wages whilst innovation for new products takes place and investigations of new market sectors and relationship /network building.
Don’t forget the need to make short videos and create pitch decks – those presentation skills are increasingly part of the initial assessment. Communication is KEY for success.
The forms require you to set out the vision for your company, to justify why the grant is needed and to check that you have the finance to make the project happen. After all, they need to risk assess the situation themselves whilst also being mindful that they are there to support business when investors won’t do it alone or at all.
SSC have worked in the grant sector in various ways. Members of our team have at times been part of local development agencies like Scottish Enterprise supporting companies through the grant applications process. We have colleagues that work as assessors for grants at multiple levels including EU EIC Innovation grants. We have also been at the coalface creating applications from scratch for various agencies and even for business competitions and had solid levels of success across the whole grant spectrum from R2B grants from Business Finland to SMART innovation grants in Scotland/UK.
These days, we are very much in the business of sharing that knowledge with others!
First Published: 1 Dec 2021
This has been a busy year for SSC. · 8 new clients · 2 start-ups taken from idea to pitching – they are waiting for funding at this time. · 100% success rate on grant funding applications · Doubled the size of the SSC team We have been working with several universities in Scotland, rest of UK and in Finland on a variety of market research and scoping projects across Biotech, Robotics, AI and Education support. We have been involved in 9 projects for start-ups coming from the wider entrepreneurial landscape, ranging from individuals through to established companies considering their own spin-outs. Two of them, PolyMara and ElderThrive are now awaiting funding to be able to move forward to operations and employing staff. This is a record for us, and it feels like a milestone accomplishment! The individuals have come with excellent ideas where they needed help getting business plans for funding and help putting their team together, and it has been wonderful to see the benefits of our wider reach from our expanded team helping to locate skills and resource for them. Helping fully formed companies divest ideas into new business units or spin-outs has been a new area for us, it is a different set of challenges from working with universities towards the same outcome, but no less interesting. We have had the opportunity to work with community development companies seeking ambitious outcomes and focussing on re-population of their areas and creation of quality jobs. Cait has again been involved with EU project grant assessments and we have been grant writing too, helping to plan the strategy of which grant funds to apply for as well contributing to the narrative and the editing. One of the other areas where SSC excels is being able to offer additional resource for activities such as sales , useful when a company is wanting to step into a new territory but can’t yet justify the recruitment of an employee of their own. This year we were able to work with a Finnish company WellO2 as they explored the UK market and Cait was on-hand at the Glasgow Vegan Fest assisting Naked Kimchi as they showcased their produce. Our prizes of strategy sessions for Scottish EDGE winning companies have also helped companies think about how to be efficient and effective with their time. Back in Feb we put up a blog about setting challenges and giving yourself and your company targets that are outside the pure economic zone so we’re thinking it is timely to review our own progress in that area. We have found working with community projects very interesting and therapeutic. The visit to Barra was particularly inspiring seeing how a small population can pull together and plan for the future. The expansion of the SSC team has been a large milestone, the feeling that we have achieved critical mass, assembled a team that covers all aspects of putting a business together for a range of technical areas has been useful but also a confidence boost allowing us to dream bigger for ourselves as well as our clients. Cait has been involved with Scottish EDGE as a panel judge and Ansku has continued with her role mentoring companies with NOME . Keeping active in the entrepreneurial community in Nordic and UK helps to get us out of the office and interacting with new sectors and innovations. And we have also managed to achieve our ambition of being able to take a proper summer break, stopping all business activity for a month and making sure that we all got a chance to relax, recharge and spend time in nature and with friends and family. Looking ahead to 2025 SSC feels a more busy, confident place with a really good team able to help and it feels like we are strongly aligned with our mission and ethos to help business ideas emerge and grow within a collaborative, collegiate, and supportive approach.
20 Years!
Introducing Our Team Members!
Barra Leading the Way for a Sustainable Future.
"....... a deeper understanding of our business."
You’ll be aware that SSC have a great team of skilled teaching professionals who have grown their knowledge from long careers working in industry. We have practical business experience and love to share that knowledge with others. Of course we’re very proud of what we do but it’s even better when you hear it directly from your own customers. Niina Karvinen is a project manager for the Erasmus+-funded Blueprint project called the European Social Innovation Campus, ESIC, at the Diaconia University of Applied Sciences in Finland, at their Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovations. After working with SSC on several occasions, Niina was happy to share her thoughts: “While working at Oulu University, I had the opportunity to provide Strategic Scientific Consulting courses to my PhD students and university researchers and participate myself. In the Presentation Skills and Productization of Your Own Expertise Training courses, the contents were carefully planned, identifying the needs of the individual participants and engaged students with tailored learning tasks in various ways during the courses. The participant feedback supports this finding and I was delighted with the outcomes. I still use what I learned in the classes in my everyday life, both in my work and as a PhD student! I highly recommend the customised training offered by Strategic Scientific Consulting for universities and business professionals. These training packages, together with highly talented coaches, can strengthen skills and help you make your voice and message heard”. Thanks Niina! For more information on SSC Skills for Business, Click on "Services: Courses" from this website menu
It’s now February, the darkest shortest days of the year are behind us and hopefully the weather will improve. All that periphery stuff really makes a difference to the wellbeing of a team, even if no-one suffers from SAD the extra effort of getting anywhere, or just keeping awake when all your sensory inputs are telling you to hibernate can take a toll. For businesses this is the time of the year when we often look at goals, set targets, adjust the budget plan and try to inject enthusiasm into the projects and workforce. Looking at the challenges for your company – how many of them that have been set are purely focussed on economic outcomes? How well is your company embracing and challenging itself on the environmental impact or social impact of what you are about? If you are thinking about any grant application in the coming year, you are more than likely to see sections on economic, social and environmental impact, on your plan for Net Zero and your approach to diversity. These areas are important, they are worth consideration rather than a rushed paragraph or two just before hitting submit. For us at SSC, Sustainable Development is a big thing. We truly believe that embracing a better world, with better products and a reduced inequality gap is the best route for businesses everywhere. Profit is important, but it is only part of the package. Having clarity on your status against Net Zero Scope 1, 2 and 3 is going to become increasingly important for the supply chain of all your customers. Why not get ahead on that as well? If any of these areas (Net Zero, Grant applications, Sustainable Development measurables) are important to you or you want to address them in your 2024 challenges then let us know and we can assist with a strategy session. Dr Cait Murray-Green
As business leaders, some of us are starting to get our heads around Net Zero and Scope 1, 2 and 3 requirements. Some of us will be making progress with Life Cycle Analysis; perhaps also traceability of our products and services. And others will be baffled by all the above.
Take the opportunity to give back when you can
How to be Truly Maximising your Sustainable Development Credentials When Business talks about Sustainability and being sustainable what do they mean? The economic aspects of creating a business model that will be successful for the future is pretty much understood by all, but what about the other aspects – the impacts on the environment and on people? Sustainability is really about bringing together the three aspects Economic, Social and Environmental, (often referred to as the three pillars) with equal importance and implementing them into how business interacts with the world and its resources. Sometimes businesses which are highly technical can find it difficult to relate their ambitions and practices into a world which needs them to be more considerate. They can feel disengaged as they are so embedded in the market needs of a capital led industry and surrounded in urban locations long since selected for rapid air-links and motorway links to suppliers and customers. However, the reality is that the need to embrace change across all business is of urgency no matter the market you are in or want to get into – and it is possible to achieve at a fundamental level without the need for greenwashing! At the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012, Member States adopted the outcome document "The Future We Want" in which they decided, to launch a process to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to establish the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 SDGs was adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York in September 2015. With the post-Covid Build Back Better Sustainable Innovation Fund in the UK and the NGEU largest ever funding budget from the EU there are many opportunities for companies with Innovation ideas to be able to obtain some grant support. Sustainable Development isn’t just a buzzword, it is rapidly becoming a deeply embedded set of criteria that all innovation must embrace and align with in or fail to get public sector support. From the research that SSC has done it appears that companies fall into mainly two categories. The first is the group of companies that feel their business cannot fit into the criteria and that the goals really don’t apply to their ultra-technical market. They tend to make some effort around Gender Equality and skip rapidly over the list without any real engagement with the meaning of what is being asked across the other 16. The second are companies that are aligned with the BioEconomy, with getting a balance with the Three Pillars of society, environment and economics, and very naturally are doing what the UN has challenged them with. The first group tend to miss out positives about their businesses which could help them bring SD into their working practice without much effort, and therefore more easily score more thoroughly on the Sustainable Development section of any application forms. The second group tend to miss out positives about their businesses which they are failing to headline and include in their applications. Here is our guide to what you can do to make your company more clearly and visibly aligned with the 17 Goals