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Our support for entrepreneurs is a priority for us; supporting entrepreneurs has featured repeatedly as key driver for economic growth in our annual business plans.
Over the past three years we issued over 2,000 offers of assistance to young businesses that were less than 5 years old, accounting for 30% of all the offers made during this time. This represents almost £57m or 22% of total assistance offered by Invest NI, a total investment of £280m in the economy and will lead to the creation of almost 2,000 jobs. We estimate that these young businesses account for 18% of both total economic investment and new jobs generated in Northern Ireland during this time.
Several of these offers were made to High Potential Start Up businesses (HPSUs) which are young, early-stage companies, with ambitious management teams. During that same timeframe, we provided assistance of £8.28m to 34 HPSUs which led to the creation of 117 jobs.
Here is a snapshot of some of the ways we have supported entrepreneurs since over recent years.
Local Economic Development (LED) Programme
From 2017 – 2022, with funding from Invest NI and ERDF, 11 local councils delivered 41 entrepreneurship programmes, collectively investing £22m in local micro and small businesses. As a result of these programmes, over 650 businesses were referred to Invest NI and we continue to work with over one-third of them. Find out more on how we are supporting ambitious young companies across Northern Ireland.
From Student to First Sale
We have funded 22 From Student to First Sale businesses over the past 5 years; working with university and students’ union enterprise support services we have provided £15,000 grants to viable, young businesses to help them develop and grow.
These businesses are highly innovative and present great growth potential, evidenced by the fact that 14 of original 22 businesses are still on our books, including the highly innovative Born Maverick and movetru.
Ambition to Grow
As businesses evolve, the type of support they need also changes. To ensure support was available to young, innovative enterprises we developed our Ambition to Grow Programme last year. This programme is specifically designed for businesses that have not previously benefitted from Invest NI support, but are generating sales, or are about to start selling.
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