Briony Phillips is Engine Shed’s new Scale-Up Enabler. Joining us from the Open Data Institute, she will work to develop the scale-up ecosystem in the West of England. This will include mapping the current state of the ecosystem, identifying businesses across the West of England that need scale-up support, signposting existing activities and designing new ones to help them grow.
To qualify as a scale-up business, a company must have existed for three or more years, have 10 or more employees and be growing by 20% year on year in terms of either staff numbers or sales. According to statistics from the Scale Up Institute, there are 183 organisations in the West of England who fit the bill, and Briony will be identifying where they are and helping them access the support that they need to enable them to scale-up. She will also be looking at how to create the best environment for increasing the number of scale-ups and helping develop the West of England Growth Hub.
Briony has worked as a freelance Open Innovation Consultant, designing innovation activities for organisations around the world, including GODAN Open Data Challenge in New York and South Africa’s Responsive Cities Challenge. She also designed and ran the Open Data Challenge for the Open Data Institute in partnership with Nesta.
Briony is working with us on a 12month contract with funding from the West of England LEP, the University of Bristol and Business West.