Research, evaluation and insight

Creative Edinburgh (CE) aimed to: bring together the creative industries community in Edinburgh; encourage growth in the sector; and raise the ambitions of those companies involved in commercial activity.

Get Ready for Work (GRfW) aimed to provide training and additional support to young people who otherwise ‘would be unable to access other training, learning or employment opportunities’ in Lanarkshire’s rural and remote areas.

The Developing People in Tourism project (DPIT) was designed to give training support and assistance to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in the tourism sector in the Borders.

The e-Business Initiative has aimed to raise awareness and accelerate adoption of e-business and supplier development amongst businesses in Dumfries and Galloway.

The e-Business Centre (e-BC) aimed to offer e-business services and support to local businesses.

The e-Businessadvisers Programme, which ran from 2000 to 2005, was designed to address two principal market failures: companies’ lack of strategic preparation for e-business; and weaknesses in the provider community’s ability to engage with clients.

The research involved a survey of the owners of businesses with websites, in Dumfries and Galloway, looking at: the perceived success of the company website in terms of the expectations of the owner; the levels of interest in seminars, workshops, tools and fact sheets as developed and made available to clients by Scottish Enterprise; and preferred attendance times for seminars and workshops.

The rationale for the Jobs Action Team (JAT) was to use a pro-active approach to engage people not currently in mainstream employment or training programmes, particularly those resident in the Social Inclusion Partnership (SIP) areas.

The South of Scotland Loan Scheme (SoSLS) was formally established in 2004 with the objective of delivering economic added value in the South of Scotland by offering soft loans as part of a wider package of funding support for businesses identified as having job creation and growth potential.

The Ettrick Riverside project involved the £6 million redevelopment of a former Victorian Mill to provide office space and meeting facilities.

The Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) aimed to be a unique facility within the UK, and a centre of international ambition, with facilities to match.

Scottish Opera and the Theatre Royal aimed to: provide a world class cultural offering; attract tourists; promote a quality of life that enhances Glasgow and Scotland's attraction; and contribute to wider priorities of social justice, economic development, regeneration and equality through its outreach and educational programmes.

The Scottish Public Pensions Agency (SPPA) was relocated from Edinburgh to Tweedbank, near Galashiels, in 2002, as part of the Scottish Executive’s strategy of dispersing government jobs throughout Scotland and to help the ailing Borders economy which had been hard hit by the decline in textiles and electronics and by foot and mouth disease.

The aim of the Edinburgh Enterprise Campaign (EEC) was to: promote attitudinal and cultural change to enterprise among excluded groups; encourage training and education activity in local areas; and develop the local business infrastructure by creating referral systems and networks to signpost clients to Enterprise and other organisations.

The goals of the Edinburgh Pre-Incubator Scheme (EPIS) was set up to increase innovation and commercialisation of new technologies to boost productivity and to concentrate on technology-based start-ups with high growth potential, through the provision of business support.

The Edinburgh Stanford Link (ESL) was set up as a collaborative research and commercialisation programme between the Human Commercialisation Research Centre (HCRC) at Edinburgh University and the Centre for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at Stanford University in California with the aim of transforming advances in language technology into innovative, commercial products.

The electronic portfolio implementation pilot project was set up as a short-term support mechanism to support local training providers in using Learning Assistant, an e-portfolio system.

Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh and Lothian (SEEL) worked in partnership with the City of Edinburgh Council, among others, to develop the Health Care Academy, the aim of which was to provide demand-led employment and training opportunities for targeted excluded groups and match individuals with vacancies in the new Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (RIE).

The Equality Matters in Business project was developed initially by the Scottish Government, in conjunction with Scottish Enterprise (SE), with the overall aim of enhancing the advice and support available to Scottish-based SMEs on the business benefits of having good equality and diversity practices and policies in the workplace.

Various Scottish Enterprise (SE) projects receive funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); the purpose of this review is to bring together information about projects which received funding between 2000 and 2006 and which failed to submit all the data required for their final claim to the ERDF.

The Ettrick Riverside Project involved the refurbishment of a Grade A listed building in the Riverside industrial area of Selkirk into office space for start-up and growth businesses.

Scottish Enterprise Forth Valley (SEFV) awarded the Business Gateway (BG) contract to the Forth Valley Consortium (FVC) in 2002.

The Workforce Development Project (WDP) aimed to up-skill the Ayrshire labour force by providing organisations with the opportunity to apply for funding to continue the personal development and training of its employees.

Ontowork aimed to: provide a range of flexible, practical, client-focused services; encourage and support unemployed people to return to the labour market, education and training; actively work with partners organisations to encourage the development and delivery of services; and promote the benefits of sustaining employability through a culture of lifelong learning and development.

Scottish Enterprise Ayrshire (SEA) aimed to implement the market segmentation process to identify organisations with the greatest potential for sustainable growth.