2011 has been a very busy and exciting year for Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership. One of our most significant achievements was being awarded LEP (Local Enterprise Partnership) status, which has given a further boost to Northamptonshire’s economic growth plans for the next few years. This has opened up crucial communication channels with key decision makers, and also enables us to access funding opportunities for the County, including most recently the Growing Places funding.
This year a variety of successful industry events have been hosted across the county. Our second annual Northamptonshire Business Summit was a sell-out and saw over 200 businesses gather at the Silverstone ‘Wing’ to network, take part in interactive workshops, share ideas and learn about future growth plans for the county. It was fantastic to see so many businesses support this summit and celebrate Northamptonshire’s business community.
Our Future Proofing the Food and Drink Sector event, featuring a presentation from international food waste campaigner Tristram Stuart, was also a great success. It united a diverse range of both Northamptonshire’s larger, well known food and drink companies with a number of smaller businesses to discuss how they will all prepare for the future. We will be continuing to build on our work within this sector during 2012, including looking at how to build on the already successful annual Northamptonshire Food & Drink Awards programme.
In 2011, we led on work to support Northamptonshire’s expertise in the ‘High Performance Technologies’ sector. We will be looking at similar work to support our Logistics and Transport sector with the launch of a steering group in the New Year. There’s lots of exciting developments for Northamptonshire already on the horizon for 2012; with the projects we have planned we anticipate that there’ll be lots of new opportunities for our county’s businesses to take advantage of.
On behalf of Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership, we’d like to wish everyone all the very best for a prosperous 2012.
