Alba Innovation Centre – a growing community of technology companies

The Alba Innovation Centre located in Livingston, close to the ‘heart of Scotland', is at the hub of an expanding community of early stage technology companies with significant growth ambitions.

The centre is owned by Scottish Enterprise and is operated on its behalf by Innovation Centres Scotland Ltd (ICS).

The Innovation Centre model provides proven methods of supporting start-ups and entrepreneurs as they tackle a range of issues common among new businesses. This support, now branded the Alba Incubation

Service, is recognised as a vital means of improving business survival and encouraging innovation in products and services. The approach was originally developed by ICS at the Hillington Park Innovation Centre. In 2009, it became one of the first incubators in the UK to attain the industry's highest accreditation standard for best practice.

The range of support offered by experienced advisors includes:

• Developing the business plan and facilitating strategy
• Investigating the market and assessing opportunities
• Supporting the assessment of technology and intellectual property of the business
• Assisting with developing the management teams, the people, skills and training requirements
• Assessing the funding requirements of the business, designing a funding package and identifying and sourcing funds, including equity, debt and grants
• Working with team to identify sales channels and development and implementation of a sales plan
• Determining the level of innovation and development and sourcing appropriate grants or other similar support
• Providing access to Scottish Enterprise financial grants and programmes for training, product development and marketing.

This is an excerpt from Enterprising Scotland Spring 2012.  Read full article at http://www.enterprisingscotland.com/images/stories/ES_Spring_2012/ES%20Spring%202012_Web.pdf