Working Collaboratively

You can strengthen your business, raise its profile and open up a world of new opportunities by collaborating with other businesses and organisations within and outside Northern Ireland. Invest NI’s support in this area is both advisory and financial.

What areas can we advise on?

• We can help to link your business with other businesses, colleges, universities or organisations so that you can explore ways to exploit market or research opportunities.
• We run workshops about collaborative working and can signpost you to other sources of advice and assistance.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) Programme Call

Have you an exciting and innovative project that could benefit from university based research and knowledge and a graduate to help you deliver it? Invest Northern Ireland is currently inviting registrations of interest from Northern Ireland businesses for the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) Programme. For more details click here

Innovation Vouchers

Innovation Vouchers are designed to enable Northern Ireland SME's to access knowledge and expertise to develop innovative solutions to business issues. It provides a voucher of up to £4000 to enable enterprises to engage with one of the 41 universities, colleges and other publicly funded research organisations throughout Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

The next call for applications will be June 2013.  More details and how to apply can be found at www.innovationvouchers.com

What financial support do we offer?

We may be able to offer funding to support the cost of:

• research and development
• embedding new capability in your business through partnering with an academic institution
• networking (covering network facilitation)
• your first business interaction with a college/university
• scoping, defining and planning an R&D project.

To download more details click here

We assess applications for financial support on a case by case basis and your business will be expected to pay a proportion of the cost of the assistance.

Your next step

If you are interested in getting advice and support relating to collaborative working, please fill in our short enquiry form or call us on 0800 181 4422.