Six Scottish SME’s have been awarded contracts with NHS Scotland to help drive patient treatment and innovation in diabetes, dermatology, and Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD).

Scottish companies also secured 50% of the research and development funding awarded to UK companies – a total of £345,000 – as part of the recent NHS Scotland open invitation competitions.

The competitions are designed to open up traditional procurement processes and look for new solutions from businesses that can drive new revenue streams, and address big service challenges faced by the NHS and public sector organisations.

The new innovation approach will deliver £1.35m in funding from Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Government’s innovation and healthcare teams, to support participating companies. The Competitions are run by NHS Scotland, in conjunction with Innovate UK, as part of its Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) mechanism to fund UK business innovation.

The six Scottish SME’s that have secured funding are:

• AxSys Technologies, Glasgow (diabetes)
• Cohesion Medical Ltd, Glasgow (dermatology)
• Digital Treetop Ltd, Perth (IBD)
• Epipole Ltd,  Rosyth (dermatology)
• OpenBrolly Health, Elgin (IBD)
• Storm ID, Edinburgh (dermatology)

Open innovation is an established approach in encouraging collaboration to develop solutions to defined challenges. Companies test their ideas against public sector citizen or societal challenges and, if successful, are fully funded to progress them through feasibility, prototype and/or demonstrator stages.

Jim Watson, Director Innovation and Enterprise services as Scottish Enterprise said: “Using open innovation means we can help with two of Scotland’s business and healthcare challenges – get more businesses innovating and find new creative solutions to patient care.  We’re making excellent progress in encouraging more Scottish SMEs to embrace innovation to open up new global revenue stream opportunities for them.

“It’s fantastic to see Scottish companies securing more than half of the NHS Scotland R&D funding, but we’re keen to get even more Scottish SMEs involved in other open innovation competitions.”

Paul Wheelhouse, Scottish Government Minister for Business, Innovation, and Energy added: “Scotland has recently moved into the top quartile of countries in the European Union, as regards the proportion of innovation active businesses.  However, we are committed to doing even more to boost the level of investment in innovation, including providing £400,000 of financial support to this SBRI project, to champion health innovation which is an important driver of sustainable economic growth.

“I offer my congratulations to these companies which have demonstrated their ability to develop and commercialise new ideas in the health sector, as, in doing so, they are helping patients and the NHS alike.”