5. 6. Statement: The Small Business Research Initiative

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:42 pm on 21 March 2017.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:42, 21 March 2017

Thank you. That’s quite a range of questions and I’ll do my best to answer them. In terms of ICT and broadband, for example, one of the things that the Member will know is that we’re looking at what we’re going to do for the end of the current project and for the remaining few per cent of the Welsh population and premises not covered. And this is certainly one of the things that we might well consider to do that and to drive innovative solutions in particular areas. Once we have a map of all the premises that are not included in the current contract, which we will have very shortly, then, we’ll be able to consider how we might structure such a competition. But it’s an excellent example of something that might be worth picking up with this. As I said to Adam Price, there are other data-driven ICT solutions that might happily sit inside this initiative as well.

In terms of what we’ve done so far, we’ve awarded 44 contracts at phase 1 stage. There were a further five small contracts awarded under a slight predecessor to it, which are not included, but are really part of it. And there are 22 at phase 2 so far. Thirty-eight per cent of that was won by Welsh organisations and 44 per cent of all contract awards were made to Welsh organisations. We had five Welsh businesses that were successful in non-Welsh SBRI competitions, so we’ve supported our businesses to apply outside of Wales. We had four public bodies running more than one challenge at the same time and we’ve now got two Welsh businesses that won our challenges, potentially inward investing. Because what we do is, when we get somebody interested in taking up one of the challenges, we also support them with our business support programmes to persuade them to come to Wales, effectively, and we use that concept to get there. So, it’s been very successful on a number of fronts.

We’re very keen on running it into standard procurement practice and we encourage SMEs to apply for it. It’s not confined to SMEs—anybody can apply—but actually, we’ve had quite a lot of interest from SMEs and I’m very happy to look at any way of encouraging even more SMEs to apply for it in future. The idea is obviously to reward the good idea and then help the company commercialise it, so there’s no scale necessary to start that process off.