Grow Your Business

With so many growing businesses under our roof at The Core, we are delighted that Invest NewcastleGateshead and Common Purpose are holding their FREE intensive leadership course for North East SMEs here. The course offers North East SMEs the opportunity to explore innovation and grow their businesses with some of the regions high profile organisations and business leaders.

The two organisations have developed an intensive leadership course: Innovation, Building your Leadership Ambition,  which will feature keynote speakers, Lucy Armstrong, CEO, The Alchemists and Professor Roy Sandbach, Chair of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, as well as business leaders from SMD, Zerolight, Greggs and Nestle who will share their experiences of growing a business through innovation.

The course – which is fully funded for ERDF eligible SMEs based in the North East region  – will take place 18-19 March 2015 at The Core and on-site at the participating organisations’ premises. The practical activities have been designed to help decision makers improve leadership thinking, build networks and share expertise with regional peers as well as focus their thinking around the challenge of innovation.

Keynote speaker, Lucy Armstrong, commented: “Innovation is not necessarily about being an ‘inventor’, it’s about solving customers’ problems. Innovative businesses are solutions driven and grow their businesses by being tuned in and responsive to the changing needs of their customers.

“On this course, I’ll be encouraging people to examine and discuss what innovation means to SMEs while providing tools and tips on encouraging innovation and developing better leaders – things that they can take away and apply to their own growth strategies. This is also a great opportunity for businesses to hear first-hand from some of our region’s most successful businesses and learn how innovation can help them realise their own ambitions for growth.”

Eutechnyx and ZeroLight CEO Darren Jobling believes that placing innovation at the core of his business has yielded big returns for the real-time 3D visualisation specialists.  He said: “Innovation isn’t just something you can force onto your business – it has to be one of your core values. To achieve this you have to work hard to create the culture in which creativity thrives, and this is no easy task. By emphasising innovation in ZeroLight we’ve grown from start-up to world leader in real-time 3D visualisation within 2 years, producing solutions for companies such as IBM. I’m looking forward to delivering some practical advice to the SME leadership course on how to drive innovation as an attitude and a business value”.

The Innovation: Building your Leadership Ambition course is part-financed by the European Regional Development Fund for 2007-13

For more information and to register, click here.