The Smart route to success

摘要

It has been suggested (Letters, 31 March) that the Department of Trade and Industry Smart Awards do not provide suitable backing for innovation in the UK. In our company we have won four Smart awards over the years and have found them to be a valuable source of risk funding for projects. The key word here is risk. These were projects which would have had most banks running scared. They were either too small or at too early a development stage for venture capitalists to consider. And we were talking about funding of perhaps £45,000, with more again if the project was successful and moved to the stage two scheme.