Entrepreneurship
Theme: Innovation
Cross-cutting themes covered: Business incubation facilities, Networking opportunities
Name of project: The Innovatory
City: London
Who is it? The Innovatory operates the Digital Incubator for London, supporting and nurturing innovative enterprises.
Where is it? The Innovatory is based in a deprived residential area of London, in the London Borough of Hackney. Unemployment in the borough in August 2000 was 10.8%, more than twice the average rate for London. Evidence shows that businesses starting in Hackney in 1998 were less likely to survive over one to three years than in London or Great Britain.
What is it? The Innovatory provides accommodation and incubation for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and creative start-up businesses, alongside tailored business support activities. It also offers networking opportunities for businesses in the digital media and ICT sectors.
Who funds it?
How does it work? Business incubation: The Innovatory offers a new model of incubation, with a sliding scale of rents, heavily subsidised services and provision of a full range of IT equipment.
Provision of tailored business support: The project provides business support for potential and existing SMEs . The Innovatory reaches out to the local community, using community-based surgeries to deliver business support in the offices of business professionals, and through employing advisers who speak the language of the target community. Recruiting and training local advisers ensures a culturally diverse team and reflects the diversity of The Innovatory’s clients.
Anything else? Networking opportunities: The Innovatory has created a new business-to-business network which represents a number of key business sectors. Various cultural/sectoral sub-networks have also been set up by the Innovatory, for example networks of technology SMEs , women-owned SMEs and Vietnamese, Turkish and Jewish business owners.
What are the results? Successes of The Innovatory’s activities include:
Is it successful? The programme prioritises accessibility and seeks to engage hard-to-reach groups. This has been a particularly successful aspect of its approach. For example, many successful seminars have been delivered in local community languages such as Turkish, Kurdish and Vietnamese.
Is the model transferable? The Innovatory is currently setting up an incubator project in Prague on the same model, showing that the whole project can be replicated. Reaching out to local communities, through using community-based surgeries to deliver business support in offices of business professionals, and through employing advisers who speak the language of the target community, is also transferable elsewhere.
Building on local competitive advantages? However, incubators must build on genuine business clusters. The Innovatory is located in an authentic business cluster – a strong and spontaneous cluster of ICT, design and culture businesses on the fringe of the City of London. Clustering has to be spontaneous rather than engineered.
The Innovatory has a very strong network of partners, experts and mentors who donate time and expertise to the project. When selecting partners, The Innovatory looks for a track record of ‘flexibility, innovation and contract delivery’.
What are the barriers to transferability? Employment and the business regulatory frameworks in different countries could prove to be barriers to transferring the model of The Innovatory.
