Invitation to Tender Business Investment for Growth (BIG) Productivity Programme Evaluation and Summative Assessment Cornwall Development Company TEN473

Tender description

CDC is seeking to commission an experienced supplier to undertake a robust assessment of the BIG Productivity programme against its objectives, outputs and outcome targets. The evaluation will consist of three phases with separate reporting requirements and will require prior experience of evaluating programmes. BIG Productivity programme will support the transformation of the Cornish economy through co-investments in long term and sustainable business growth. BIG Productivity will build upon the strengths of the previous BIG and BIG 2 projects, whilst also offering a more targeted and innovative approach towards enhancing the capabilities and growth of local SMEs to raise productivity, collaboration and competitiveness regionally and nationally. The programme has attracted £4.1M of ERDF funding and was approved in November 2019 and finishes in June 2022 and. Specifically, the BIG Productivity programme aims to: • invest in growth projects brought forward by innovative, ambitious and well-managed Cornish based businesses; • work in collaboration with partner institutions to enable local SMEs gain access to national and global markets; • provide a targeted advisory service tailored to support service to work across key sectors and support enterprises with potential to grow. The advisory service will allow the recipients to adopt and utilise new technologies much quicker, expand their regional and national coverage and increase their overall productivity. The main objectives and outputs of BIG Productivity programme are to • support a total of 175 businesses; • offer a tailored investment package to meet the needs of new and established Cornish SMEs. The investments will be in the range from £2,500 to £150,000 and be awarded at a maximum of 45% for small size companies and a maximum of 35% for medium size companies. The lower level investments tend to lead to increases in turnover and ongoing investment in future growth. Similarly higher level investments lead to increase in productivity, competitiveness and operations. Approximately 80% of the investments will be capex in nature; • Disperse £3.15M of grants and attract a minimum of £3.85M of private SME match funding • create at least 175 new jobs (40 of which are level 4 or above as defined by the Regulated Qualifications Framework (RQF) or the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ) • provide a non-financial advisory support to 30 businesses to access new markets, improve their processes and thus significantly improve their productivity; • support the introduction of 30 new to the firm and 10 new to market products.