Bang for Buck in the Brave New World

Ten years of running Dare to be Digital has provided a great deal of learning about the success mix of young talent, mentoring and working environment that delivers the awe-inspiring ten-week demos we put on show at ProtoPlay each year. We are confident we can take that model and have an impact on business support and skills development for the sector.

For clarity, we're planning to support projects across the UK. We will generally work with university partners in strategic locations and the students recruited to our work-for-hire pool will be from any location and any type of programme, provided they can demonstrate abilities above our entry bar, like Dare.

Since the launch we have had a flood of interest in applying for grants. We have also begun discussions with a number of non-SME partners who might act in a commissioning role to provide confidence that any project we grant funds to has more than just a line of sight to market. In these situations we will support an SME where it is clear that a market partner has taken a field-related option to exploit that leaves the SME's IP intact.

But - as far as I'm concerned this is just the beginning. I began working to secure this new funding as long ago as 2007 and it has taken this long to get a full UK project together, so I am under no illusions about how long the next phase will take. I am working on the development of a new project finance fund as part of our quest at Abertay University to improve the working capital and talent mix in small companies.

It is an interesting exercise. Most of the time I have Monty-Pythonesque conversations with the established finance world that entirely miss the point - that creative businesses cannot generally fund multiple IP generation from debt or equity finance. However, there are rays of hope and there are knowledgeable people with a track record in investment who do seriously get this.

This is an area where government intervention could be helpful too. Not in the context of putting public money in to a project finance fund of scale, but from the perspective of incentivising a climate for this type of fund. Given the Treasury's lack of appetite for sectoral interventions the incentives could be generic - games development isn't the only creative business that could benefit from new approaches to content-linked project finance. Finding appropriate fiscal levers to incentivise project finance fund creation can be tackled at the macro level.

In a climate of cuts to Higher Education we should also be looking for ways to innovate in all areas of public finance and make sure that private sector investment in project finance could be incentivised where skills development and employability enhancement is part of the mix. There is no reason why the win-win package we're planning for our new business support programme at Abertay University couldn't be scaled up.

One thing is for sure - we're going to be living in a world of significantly reduced public expenditure, possibly post-RDA also, so there needs to be a high attention to bang for buck. The Minister has made it clear the bucks that are there will be for generic business climate improvement. Abertay University plans to make sure that we get the best bang for this industry that we can.