Create Growth South East

The programme, funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is providing support for high-growth potential businesses in the creative industries to grow, including through developing the knowledge and skills they need to access private sector investment.

This project spans across Greater Essex, Kent, Medway, East and West Sussex as well as Brighton and Hove authorities.

Eligible businesses are benefiting from:

• an intensive business support programme designed to improve the leadership capacity of pre-scale-up creative businesses, so they are better able to gain finance, particularly from investors
• access to national and regional angel investor networks, developed by Innovate UK, that are aware and prepared for creative industry investment opportunities
• access to a share of £7 million in grants, managed by Innovate UK, for businesses within the consortium’s local authority areas. The grants competition closed on 8 February 2023

Unfortunately, creative businesses are not currently able to submit expressions of interest to join the programme. However, there will be rolling admissions onto cohorts throughout the programme until 2025. Visit the Create Growth South East website for more details, and to sign up to their newsletter.

Eligible companies will be Intellectual Property-rich micro and Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) who have at least two employees, can demonstrate growth in the past two years and have ambitions to expand in the future. 

They must fall into one of the following sub-sectors:

• Film, television, video, radio and photography.
• Design and designer fashion.
• Music, performing and visual arts.
• Creative IT, software and computer services (game design, artificial intelligence, software engineering and so on)

Eligible businesses must be located within the administrative boundaries of:

• Greater Essex.
• Kent.
• Medway.
• East Sussex.
• West Sussex.
• Brighton & Hove.