Enterprise & Innovation


pressures are high and organisations prioritise investing internal finance and staff time on other (perhaps more immediately urgent) activities, innovation and R&D can fall by the wayside. However, as discussed above, over the long term a failure to invest in innovation does have consequences for competitiveness…


• ...Which makes it interesting that businesses cite market competition as a barrier to innovation. Challenging the mind-set that investing in innovation represents a cost rather than (if done properly) a strategy for enhancing competitiveness is crucial.


• Access to employees with the right skills is a recurrent issue for local businesses – and not just in relation to innovation. The challenge for businesses is how they look beyond this as a barrier and see it as an opportunity to review the skills that they do need and explore opportunities to partner with other organisations on either staff training or whole innovation projects to fill those gaps.


Interestingly, the lowest rated barrier was lack of credit or private


Feature ‘Challenging the mind-set


that investing in innovation represents a cost rather than (if done properly) a strategy for enhancing competitiveness is crucial’


equity with 71 per cent rating it as of low or no importance to their business.


What can we do about it? With this in mind, we have a number of recommendations:


For stakeholders Reduce input costs for businesses arising from taxation There have been some positive


interventions on supporting investment in innovation and R&D from the Government lately. For instance: the Government has announced that it will raise total R&D investment to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2027 and has already increased the rate of R&D tax credits to 12 per cent. It has also unveiled a £725m investment in the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for programmes that “capture the value of innovation” as


part of the approach outlined in the Industrial Strategy. However, we have also seen a


rise in costs for businesses arising from taxation. When we surveyed businesses across the West Midlands region earlier this year as part of the British Chambers of Commerce Business Taxation Survey, we found that 76 per cent firms had experienced an increase in the overall burden


October 2018 CHAMBERLINK 51


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