Ambitious Essex - Start Up Accelerator

Essex County Council (ECC) has published its Sector Growth Strategy, setting out the areas of the economy that ECC will focus on developing to bring more productive inclusive, and sustainable growth to the County over the next 20 years. These are: • Construction (including green construction and retrofit) • Clean energy • Advanced manufacturing and engineering • Digi-tech • Life sciences (including med-tech and care-tech)

We need to build an ecosystem that supports the growth of businesses in these sectors so that the benefits are felt by local residents. Currently, Essex has a higher number of SME's than the national average, but few of them scale up to become drivers of good jobs and increased prosperity for the region, adding to the contribution we make to the country's wealth.

Essex County Council is therefore seeking quotations from bidders to deliver a development programme that identifies and engages local entrepreneurs and innovators and directly supports them to create a business that will go on to thrive. The programme should: - Identify and engage potential business founders that fall into defined criteria set out below - Support them to take their start up from idea / early stage to creation - Support that start up to go on and access further support from the ecosystem, including pitching to accelerators and understand pathways to funding, including advice on writing bids for funding - Advocate for Essex businesses as candidates for scale-up and accelerator programmes outside of Essex and to investors - Ensure that at the end of the accelerator programme, the founders have a clear future pathway to success, either through longevity of their current business or understanding how they can follow the same pathway with a new idea - Provide evaluation of the programme, reporting data on the impact on measures such as: Gross Value Added; Jobs created; Value of business sales; Products developed or launched; Support provided to businesses in Levelling Up areas.

This programme will take place in a complex environment of other support programmes, and bidders therefore must demonstrate how they will collaborate with the County Council and partners to build on the existing support.

Additional information: Additional point of contact - Michael Veasey, [email protected]