The Scale-up Challenge:

Britain is urged to support scale-ups not just start-ups.

According to a recent report from investor and entrepreneur Sherry Coutu CBE, a focus on scale-up companies is critical to UK jobs, wealth and competitive advantage.  The ‘Scale-up report on UK Economic Growth’ defines scale-ups as companies with more than ten staff and an average annualised growth in employees or turnover of more than 20% per annum over three years. The report argues that despite the UK’s success in creating new start-ups, not enough of these new businesses are scaling-up into large companies, and Britain still has a lower proportion of large companies in comparison to the US and other nations. Thus Coutu argues that the UK should focus less on start-ups and more on scale-ups and states that closing the ‘scale –up gap’ would have the single biggest impact out of everything leaders in government, business and academia can do to drive economic growth.

The report identifies some of the more important issues that challenge our scale-up leaders, and provides some recommendations for urgent action to address the issues, in order to “give the UK a much better chance to create the next Google.”

The man with a mission to make London a world-leading tech city:

Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates, talks to Enterprise about how he has built a network of 1,400 advocates in just two years.

Russ Shaw founder of the group Tech London Advocates (TLA) in April 2013, an advocacy group that aims to support technology start-ups in finding new investment, fresh talent and achieve high growth. Russ started with 100 advocates from his own network, the group now as over 1,400 TLAs, ranging from start-ups to large corporates, as well as angel investors, venture capitalists and private equity funds. Russ states that with London’s unique advantages in funding, structure and talent it has the potentially to be a world-renowned and vibrant tech city. However despite London’s strengths, Russ describes the challenges the London tech community might face.

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