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For businesses innovating in the marine and maritime sectors, finding a partner for collaboration can be a game-changing step. It can be a powerful route to overcoming technical challenges, accelerating breakthroughs, accessing new markets, and building credibility on a global stage.
As an Innovate UK Business Growth Innovation & Growth Specialist, my job is to utilise this international network and help our regional innovators find partners for collaboration in the UK, Europe and beyond.
If you’re facing a technical challenge or have niche specialisms to offer other organisations, Innovate UK Business Growth can help you to quickly find the partners that would otherwise take hours of networking to reach.
The Business Growth Service at Innovate UK provides you with access to Europe’s largest online database of business opportunities, (known as the Enterprise Europe Network), featuring thousands of requests and offers from companies and R&D institutions.
Personally, I think of it as a matchmaking platform for businesses and a springboard to access international markets, new sectors and new technologies.
There are currently over 5,000 partnering opportunities on the platform, and around 150 including the word “maritime”.
As your Innovation and Growth Specialist, I can help you refine this number further, find the right opportunities for you and develop your profile to encourage incoming leads.
In addition to the profile opportunities, several events are run across the UK, Europe and further afield that facilitate meetings, meaning you can have early conversations with potential collaborators.
Broadening horizons
International collaboration is hugely beneficial for high growth SMEs, helping them to gain insights into how other countries and sectors approach particular problems.
Across technologies such as electrification, battery tech, AI, autonomy etc, there’s a lot of scope for UK businesses to learn from our international counterparts.
In Scandinavia, for instance, there are some powerful learnings around how they’ve built electrification deeply into their infrastructure and made it part of their modus operandi.
That’s why it’s important to look overseas for inspiration and opportunities, and to consider the full range of public-funded internationalisation programmes.
I therefore work to ensure there is synergy between Enterprise Europe Network and the internationalisation portfolio that is cascaded through Innovate UK, such as The Global Business Innovation Programme, the Global Incubator Programme, Horizon Europe and Eurostars funding.
In a fast-evolving maritime landscape, collaboration isn’t just a strategic advantage—it’s a necessity. Through the Enterprise Europe Network, businesses can unlock new possibilities, connect with global innovators, and take their technologies further than they ever could alone.
To get started on your international journey, contact us today at: infosw@iukbg.ukri.org
By Jayne Bradford, Innovation and Growth Specialist at Innovate UK Business Growth and a national representative for the EEN sector group for maritime.