Expert Series - From SMART to Success

Hillington Park Innovation Centre, 29th November, 8.45 - 2pm 

Receiving innovation support funding through schemes such as SMART is a great achievement for young technology companies.  But what happens next?  How do you turn great innovation into commercial success?  Where do you go for the next round of funding?

In the third and final installment of our acclaimed Expert Series of events for 2007 we aim to answer some of these questions and help accelerate the growth of your company.  Once again we have a tremendous line up of speakers, including companies who have been through this process and funders who have helped them along their way, who will share their insights as to how to make your company a success.

Dr Colin Urquhart - Dimensional Imaging
Colin Urquhart is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Dimensional Imaging Ltd, a Glasgow, based technology company, which provides high-speed, high-resolution 3D surface image capture and analysis solutions for medical, entertainment and other applications.  Dimensional Imaging was established in 2002 to commercialise world leading human body 3D capture and modelling technology developed at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Colin led the Scottish Enterprise “Proof of Concept” funded commercialisation project at the two universities, before becoming the Chief Executive Officer of the spin-out company. Dimensional Imaging initially received a SMART Award from the Scottish Executive, followed by three rounds of equity funding led by Braveheart Ventures and two rounds of debt finance from the Bank of Scotland. Dimensional Imaging has grown sales by over 700% in the last three years and has recently broken into profitability.

Andrew Richards - Codeplay
The founder of Codeplay, Andrew both manages the company and provides ideas for development of new products to meet emerging market needs. He graduated with a degree in Physics and Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and subsequently gained six years experience as a developer of hit games (including Pete Sampras Tennis) at Eutechnyx, a game development company in the North East of England. He founded Codeplay in 1997.   Andrew will be talking about what Codeplay did once the SMART grant was approved: securing matching funding, developing the technology, filing for a patent and finding customers.

Dr Sandy McKinnon - Pentech
Sandy McKinnon is a director of Pentech Ventures who focus on investing in early stage technology companies in Scotland. Sandy has nearly 10 years experience in helping successful commercialisation of defensible technology innovations. As Director of Knowledge Transfer & Technology and Research Services (TRS) at Heriot- Watt University he helped incubate twelve spin-out companies and helped them raise over £4.6M in funding. As a freelance consultant and also whilst he was with Scientific Generics in Cambridge - where he helped evolve and finally ran their Advance Technology Group - he provided due- diligence services over a wide range of sectors for a variety of blue-chip companies, institutions and VC funds. Sandy is on the boards of Sonaptic, CacheLogic, Omniperception, SeeWhy and RapidMobile. Sandy will give an investors point of view on the many considerations a high growth technology company has to consider when raising successive round of funding, the pitfalls to avoid and what an investor looks for.

Brendan Waters - ICS Ltd
Brendan leads the Innovation Advisory Services team at ICS, which encompasses the advisory teams at the Hillington Park Innovation Centre in Glasgow, the Alba Innovation Centre in Livingston and Wireless Innovation, a national project supporting wireless and mobile technology companies across Scotland.  Brendan has worked with over 70 growing technology businesses, and will share some of his insights into their successes and how they have avoided common pitfalls at the Innovation Centre. 

To register your attendance for this event please contact Lindsey Boyle on 0141 585 6306 or events@innovationcentre.org