Public Funding for Fircroft College of Adult Education

Our project is an Innovation Centre Partnership with the primary focus of Digital Technologies adoption within SME's key sectors of advanced manufacturing, engineering, dental, construction and business support services aiming to increase future economic productivity through training and supporting SMEs to leverage new technology within their industry. It will work with SMEs to support them to improve productivity and growth through improved technology adaptation and in particular our team of industry specialists will use an organisation needs analysis process to establish the needs for the business and develop a technology adoption plan for the business based on the business needs and challenges. The centre will provide direct support to business through training, advice and access to equipment. After the Innovation Centre service, we will review needs where applicable, broker business into wider support services such as Innovate UK Edge and the knowledge transfer network, local authority advisors, established Higher Education partners and WMCA Business Growth West Midlands. The project is innovative in being both unique in its model -- through being a collaboration and using the strong Further Education sector knowledge, skills and productivity -- being able to address very real and present challenges to support regional SMEs to adapt technology to improve business growth, whilst removing barriers for SMEs such as cost and resource.