Business News Round Up (02/12/2021)
Scottish medi-tech firm OrganLike is top winner (100k) at biggest ever Scottish EDGE fund awards
A record breaking £1.5 million was invested in a total of 42 businesses with innovative entrepreneurial potential as the latest winners of the Scottish EDGE Awards are revealed. Hundreds of high calibre applications were received by Scottish EDGE, the UK’s biggest funding competition for high growth potential businesses. After two days of intense pitching, judges faced a challenging task choosing the winners on the night. One of the biggest winners at the awards, held both in person and online last night, was OrganLike, experts in developing hyper-realistic organ models for surgical training. The company received a total of £100,000 to help aid their revolutionising surgical training using synthetic tissue and augmented reality technologies. Creag Dhu Ltd, which ‘accelerate ages’ single malt Scotch Whisky ‘Mashie Brig’ also joined the winners list, receiving £50,000 plus £75,000 advertising spend through the STV supported STV Growth EDGE Award.
Manchester partnership to ‘boost UK’s fintech ecosystem’
Innovate Finance has named Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) as its first strategic academic partner. As a member of the independent industry body, AMBS will explore how the financial services industry can be developed to “stay at the forefront of innovation.” “At AMBS, we are firmly behind the FinTech agenda. The region boasts strong skills in this space, as well as ever-growing digital industries,” said Fiona Devine, Head of AMBS. “Working closely with Innovate Finance will enable us to strengthen these assets further, pooling our industry expertise and academic knowledge to bring more businesses on board, not just in financial services, but further afield.” The partnership comes after an independent government review, led by Ron Kalifa OBE, which set out a strategy to keep the UK at the top of the global FinTech league table. AMBS also featured in the Review, due to its development of “cutting-edge research” to support the FinTech industry and build a pipeline of FinTech talent.
US to push back on trade deal with UK over Brexit concerns
Biden’s administration is planning on delaying its deal to remove tariffs on UK metals left over by the Trump administration, due to concerns about potential post-Brexit trade rules affecting Northern Ireland. In a communication seen by the Financial Times, a US commerce department official said that negotiations with the UK on easing steel and aluminium tariffs could not move forward, largely due to US concerns over British threats to trigger emergency clause Article 16. Article 16 is an emergency break clause for the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol that could suspend parts of the UK-EU agreement and would mean goods travelling to Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK would not be checked, if it led to difficulties.
SSE to create 850 distribution jobs with unveils £4bn investment
Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) Distribution, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SSE Plc, has today published its final business plan which includes proposals to invest around £4 billion, creating over 850 jobs between 2023-28. SSEN Distribution plans to increase its investment by around a third in the north of Scotland and central southern England over the RIIO-ED2 period to accelerate the transition to smart, flexible networks and meet the net zero challenge. The proposed increase in investment to £3,994m will be delivered with no planned rise in distribution costs on customer energy bills, supporting a just and fair transition to net zero, the firm said. The final business plan includes a reduction in baseline investment of £146m from the £4,140m initially proposed in SSEN Distribution’s draft plan published in the summer, on the basis of increased efficiencies and innovation as well as through recalibration of the amount of funding to be agreed through the Uncertainty Mechanism.