Technology Scotland recently chatted with our member, Anchored In, for our Member Spotlight series. We find out about who Anchored In are and what they do, why they joined Technology Scotland, and much more! Take a look below and get to know them.

What does your organisation do?

Anchored In is an innovation and business consultancy advising, guiding, informing, and connecting people and organisations on their innovation journey to help them reach their maximum potential.

This means we facilitate commercialisations and collaborations between industry and academia, explore market opportunities for new technologies and carry out training and education in commercialisation. We conduct sector reviews and evaluate the impact of large intervention programs, supporting policy development as an independent broker.

We have experience designing and running facilitated workshops, developing and running commercialisation training programs, carrying out market studies and surveys, and data gathering and analytics.

Our vast network of higher education institutions, business leaders, investors and government agencies, and long-standing relationships with key individuals across industries are essential for our success.

Our biggest achievement

This is difficult to choose from since we have done many diverse things.

  • We have trained over 2000 companies and early-stage researchers in pitching for funding, with one cohort alone receiving £44 million in private investment and £11million of funded grants.
  • We secured £44 million in grant funding for quantum technologies by organising consortia for the SETsquared Scale-up programme.

Tell us something exciting about your organisation

We have just started deploying a programme to upskill academics in their industrial engagement, resulting in more grants and research funding being received. It is designed for people who are early to mid-career. It is a mix of training content as well as 1:1 support. We give them the tools to capture a research project, triage who is the best funder to approach and what a good consortium would look like. At the end of it, they have a more extensive, more focussed industrial network, understand how to describe their research to both the grant funder and with industry and know how to write a compelling grant application. In short, in our trial, more projects were receiving the funding they needed.

Why did you join Technology Scotland?

Technology Scotland has a very active photonics community we significantly engage with. We recently expanded into Scotland; thus, being a member became a natural choice.

Over the years, we have engaged with the association and have benefited from its existence. It is now time to deepen our relationship and become members, especially considering the significant overlap in quantum technologies and space sector foci.

What we can bring to the association is our understanding and wider UK and international integration in the quantum and space communities, connection to UK policymakers, knowledge of policy and help shaping policy, bidding successfully and delivery for large projects, commercialisation of research and entrepreneurship training, access to funding and international programs.

We look forward to working alongside our Scottish partners over the coming year and with interested members to ensure our programmes meet their upskilling, investment and growth needs.

Find out more about Anchored In.