Outcomes

Participants taking a look at their bespoke reports in the final workshop session

This section takes a closer look at what was delivered through the IDEAS at Daresbury ERDF project, and the impact that the workshop programmes and follow-on support had on participating companies.

To do this we will share feedback from companies, materials developed to disseminate learning and a list of academic publications that have both grown out of but also informed our engagement activity with companies.

In total, the project supported over 60 SMEs from a variety of sectors and across the North West:

(For a larger version click here).

Value of Workshops

Participant feedback told us that the workshop programme was of value in the following main ways:

Sparking off new ideas, perspectives and ways of looking at non-technical but business critical issues.
Providing access to experts and other support they would otherwise have missed.
The strength of the peer-to-peer learning emphasis, which helped to understand common problems of being an SME — providing validity and 'solvability' to difficulties.
Practicality of the sessions - use of tools and 'thought-provoking' orientation, rather than strict 'teaching' of material.

Evaluation and Review

As of June 2010 collection of tangible output data has begun, and the initial responses have been extremely positive. The project has far exceeded its targets for jobs created and safeguarded, whilst financial data is slowly coming in - for many participants there has not been enough time since the intervention for performance improvement to be measurable.

An independent evaluation into the project has begun to assess the impact of the project beyond hard outputs: if and how the programme has affected understanding and behaviour in the IDEAS partners and the SMEs the project worked with. This information will be available in due course.

The ongoing support and interest from participant companies has been overwhelming, and we hope and expect that relationships between the IDEAS partner universities and participant SMEs will continue long after the closure of this project.

Please refer to our workshop-programme specific sections for a further flavour of the impact that different parts of the support project had on participant companies:

Or look again at how we delivered the project.