Celebrating the history of our Innovation & Technology service

Our newsletter is in its 10th year and we are currently celebrating its 100th issue. We’ve made a timeline of the newsletter’s history, which also provides an overview of just how much technology has progressed within the last 10 years.

This milestone made me think about the origins of today’s Innovation & Technology service, which dates back further to the mid 1990s.

The service was initially created when the Borough of Blackburn teamed up with Lancashire Enterprises to deliver innovation & technology support from the newly built Blackburn Technology Management Centre. The centre was part of a network of technology management centres across the North West, with another Lancashire based centre based in Preston. After becoming a unitary authority in 1998, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council brought the service in house and formed the Digital Development Unit in 2001.

The council recognised the value of supporting local businesses to be more competitive and grow through greater innovation and the effective exploitation of technology. This aligned with the borough’s strategy of supporting higher value and more knowledge based business growth to offset the decline in some of the more traditional industry sectors. The first issue of our newsletter, then simply called “DDU Update”, was issued in 2002.

From 2007, our innovation & technology support was also made available to Burnley, Hyndburn and Pendle through the No Limits scheme.

In 2010, the service became part of the newly established Regenerate Pennine Lancashire, an economic development company formed in partnership with the 6 Pennine Lancashire Borough Councils and Lancashire County Council.

Since January 2011 the key focus of the innovation & technology service has been supporting small businesses across the whole of the county through the Lancashire Innovation Network, which is partly funded through the European Regional Development Fund. The scope of the newsletter, now called Innovate, has been widened to help keep local businesses up to date with all of the services available from Regenerate as well as the support available from a wide range of other organisations and initiatives both locally and nationally.

Since its inception, the service has provided in depth support to many hundreds of companies across a wide range of business sectors and we look forward to working with many more.

Hugh Roberts
Business Support & Innovation Manager
Regenerate Pennine Lancashire