Scale your business

Support for high-growth spin-outs

If you want to form a company to commercialise intellectual property (IP) owned by a university, we can help with:

• Commercialising your research and innovation
• Market assessment
• IP protection
• Building a commercial team
• Company formation

From lab to marketplace

Our High-Growth Spin-out Programme helps researchers take their ideas and inventions from the lab to the global marketplace by awarding funding and support.

If your team has had success during curiosity-driven or strategic research, and your project now has serious commercial potential, talk to someone in your organisation with responsibility for spin-outs. You could get help from the High-Growth Spin-out Programme to move forward with your plans. 

For advice, get in touch today — our team can answer your questions and explain our support for spin-outs.

Support for high-growth start-ups

If you’re an innovation-driven enterprise that aims to scale up from the start, you’re likely to need intensive specialist support during the start-up phase. This will help ensure solid foundations are in place for future scale up. We can help.

We're looking for start-up companies with a unique or disruptive product or business model. You should also have strong intellectual property that can address a customer need within a significant international market. 

We're looking for start-ups that have the potential to scale to more than £5 million in sales and/or will likely need a lot of external investment to accelerate their journey in this early phase.

Intensive support

We work closely with companies in the digital media, technology and engineering, energy, and life sciences sectors. We support:

• Development and launch of innovative and disruptive new products
• Entrepreneurial skills development
• Validation of opportunities and markets
• Development of business models and plans
• Route-to-market, sales and marketing plans
• Engagement with investors to raise necessary funding for future growth
• The building of management and non-executive teams
• Facilitation of advisory and professional networks

Skills development

If you're starting a business in Scotland, we can offer specialised, ongoing support. This includes access to skills support. Our goal is to help you grow as an entrepreneur and take your business or business idea to the next level.

We also run a variety of programmes and events throughout the year that are aimed at supporting entrepreneurs on an individual and business level.

Find out more about support for entrepreneurs 

Support for scale-ups

If you’re an innovative, ambitious and fast-growing company (seeing growth of at least 20% per year), and if you're looking to achieve £5 million to £10 million (or more) turnover within seven years, we can support you in the following areas:

• Leadership, strategy, sales and product development
• Talent attraction
• Development of international and investor networks
• Embedding innovation as a driver of sustainable growth
• One-to-one in-house company training
• Practitioner-led group executive education
• Peer-to-peer learning and ambition raising

Investment and connections

As well as providing training and support to help you become investor ready, we can help showcase your company and connect you to local, national and international investors.

We can also help you secure seed, Series A and follow-on funding to grow and scale your business.

We can connect you to:

• Networks of the partner organisations or individuals best placed to support you at any stage of growth, whatever your sector or specific needs
• Peer or role model businesses for advice, support and inspiration — this includes the use of our extensive international connections to help you extend your network around the globe

Find out more about attracting investment