1. Innova Foster
Oldham Council is working with six other partners from across Europe on Innovo Foster: a project aimed at linking innovation and start-up businesses.
The project will see stakeholders from Oldham and Greater Manchester such as the GC Business Growth Hub and Oldham Enterprise Trust, work together with partners from across Europe to share expertise to help start-up businesses ramp-up, grow and go global.
It is hoped the project, which is financed by INTERREG Europe, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), will help to improve regional policies, develop new start-up support for businesses in Oldham and Greater Manchester and serve as documented cases for analysis to other European regions and cities.
Now that the project has closed, we are pleased to say that it has had a very positive influence in how we now deliver support to businesses in Oldham. The Innova Foster project has allowed the Council and the GM Business Growth Hub to work much more closely in developing and delivering a bespoke level of business support direct to Oldham Businesses.
In that time the GC BGH has developed their service offer beyond their core growth and start-up services to provide support on access to finance, innovation, workforce development, leadership, resource efficiency as well providing specialist expertise for a range of prime capability sectors and markets.
Through our experience of study visits and peer reviews on the project in Oldham and in the Greater Manchester City Region has also meant that organisations involved in business support have participated in the stakeholder group, Team Oldham, cooperating much more than would previously happened, so strengthening local delivery.
More importantly, the stakeholders (Local Authorities, business support agencies, private sector partners) have been able to meet and discuss new ideas that have been highlighted during the peer reviews of the Innova Foster project.
One of the businesses to have benefitted from this new approach is J.A.Harrison. Keith Shepherd, Managing Director of J.A.Harrison wrote:
The support we’ve received from the Business Growth Hub, together with other parts of the Growth Company and Oldham Council has opened a whole new world. We have recently won some major new clients and are looking to expand internationally to new markets.
