This independent report highlights why our work to support leaders to scale sustainable organisations is so important to the UK economy. It also examines some of the improvements we will make, as part of our drive to deliver the best possible support for entrepreneurs solving the biggest environmental and social challenges of our time.
We believe the solutions to today’s most complex economic and social challenges lie in the minds of the brightest engineering and technology entrepreneurs.
With over a decade of experience, we support this exceptional talent by providing a unique package of funding, training, networking and mentoring from the nation’s leading experts, and we don’t take a penny in return.
The Enterprise Hub has over ten years' experience supporting entrepreneurs to spinout, startup and scale. One thing we learned from our early successes was that beyond the initial stages of startup creation and establishment, a completely new set of skills needs to be developed to navigate the scaleup journey.
The Shott Scale Up Accelerator was launched in 2020 to address this core challenge through a tailored package of training, mentoring, coaching and lifelong access to the support and convening power of the Enterprise Hub.
This programme runs at no cost to the awardees and is made possible thanks to funding made available through DSIT and Ian Shott CBE FREng.
All the learning came at a critical time for me and the company and continues to have an impact on my leadership style and thought process.
In 2024 The Academy commissioned an independent evaluation of the programme to assess its impact, competitiveness, and value for money, with the aim of quantifying programme effectiveness, economic and societal impacts and how these can be further enhanced.
3 key findings
The report outlined the programmes significant impact for UK society and economy, in line with the Academy’s vision of supporting a community of outstanding experts and innovators to engineer better lives.
- The Accelerator fills critical gaps in leadership skills and knowledge required for scaling engineering and technology companies, with confidence in leadership capabilities growing across all core training areas, and average improvements reported up to 45%.
- The Accelerator offers excellent return on investment for the UK economy at a ratio of £12.34 – £17.86 for every £1 spent through the programme, outperforming many comparable accelerator programmes and placing it at the top end of the range for support of this nature.
- The Accelerator has significantly higher representation of female and minority ethnic participants at 30% and 26% respectively, beating the UK’s engineering sector averages.
3 key learnings
Recommendations have been compared with additional feedback sources including the Steering Group and the wider team to inform a programme improvement strategy, set for delivery across 2025. From the evaluation, key learning selected to implement include:
- Articulating with greater clarity the programmes purpose, mapping outputs and outcomes to the Academy’s recently published 2030 strategy. Following this an initiative to raise accelerator profile will be implemented, leveraging alumni and partnerships to enhance engagement in regions across the UK currently underrepresented by alumni.
- A comprehensive measurement framework aligned with the Accelerator’s redesigned Theory of Change and logic model is being developed, which captures long-term leadership development goals and outcomes alongside business economic impacts.
- Programme delivery will be improved through enhancing cohesion between coaches, trainers, mentors and the programme team, integrating activities to better support newly defined outcomes and impacts.
There is a continued requirement [for this programme]. If you took it away, there would be so many missed opportunities and gaps in skills development. I know of several companies who have only survived because of this support.
The Accelerator has been invaluable for me as a leader. I probably wouldn’t have stuck with my business if I hadn’t had this timely support.
Shott Scale Up Accelerator is proven to support leadership growth of deep tech founders and leaders
Thourgh Independent evaluation of the programme, we are confident that we are meeting the needs of deeptech founders who have the potential to scale and grow engineering and technology startups. With strategic enhancements and increased focus on long-term outcomes, the programme can further strengthen its impact. The programme team is already working to deliver these improvements, and I look forward to working with our incredible community of alumni, established engineering leaders and Steeping Group to continue to support founders at this critical stage of their entrepreneurial journey.
For anyone who would like to find out more, you can read our report executive summary here
Browse more articles
Meet our Nominations for the Earthshot Prize
Let us introduce you to some of the incredible engineering organisations we have put forward as official nominators for…
Raising, Regulation and Risk
We partnered with Sifted to pull together an expert panel to dig into some of the challenges raised in our recent Royal…