Project: West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace (WMCCM)

Objective: To improve the survival and growth prospects of Engineering SMEs in the West Midlands

Collaboration Partners: Government Office for the West Midlands, Scientia and 300 Engineering SMEs

Impact: Based on the real needs of SMEs a new type of IT architecture was designed, tested and implemented. Companies are using the application to promote their capabilities, seek new opportunities and partners, work within online collaboration spaces and monitor the delivery of their product or service.

The project has over 10,000 registered company members and to date has supported over 100 new start-up businesses. WMCCM members win on average £4 billion of work per year. Over 30 other agencies use the system to help deliver their services.

The World Bank agency InfoDev who advise countries on business development, use WMCCM as a case study in their training material for Business Incubator managers. It is the only purely Virtual Business Incubator in the world.