The UK is keen to increase the number of companies that stay in the country to grow and scale. To achieve this, it will need the support of domestic corporate investors.
While the UK is widely seen as a great place to start a new company, it has historically struggled to keep those companies as they grew and scaled. Now a quiet but radical set of reforms on the public sector side is aiming to help keep more of these growth-stage companies in the UK.
"We're really good at getting that academic base to start businesses, to spin out. The challenge has been how do you get them to actually get to growth and to scale, and to do that in and from the UK," said Scott O'Brien, chief investment officer of Innovate UK, the UK's national innovation agency, speaking at the GCV Symposium in London last month.
One lever that UK public innovation bodies are keen to pull is getting greater involvement from UK corporations in the startup ecosystem. Corporate investors typically bring more than just capital when they invest in startups. They can offer help with pilots, early customer connections and industrial expertise.
Corporate investors, O'Brien said, have valuable insight on sales trends, business models and the customer pool, which could be harnessed to help startups, particularly in the scale-up phase. Working more closely with corporate investors was in line with Innovate UK's shift from being an early-stage grant-giving body to a more commercial "targeted approach", he said. The focus is moving from funding isolated startup projects to supporting entire business lifecycles through "account management" and onboarding private investors earlier.
Maija Palmer
Maija Palmer is editor of Global Venturing and puts together the weekly email newsletter (sign up here for free).
