MORE than three years after being set up by government, and with a budget of £100,000 a year, the Isle of Man Business Incubation Centre (BIC) is now expected to move towards self funding.
Tynwald was yesterday told in a written answer to a question that the BIC’s set up phase was completed and that Capital Select Ltd - which manages the centre - should “review the options of moving towards a self-funding model.”
Economic Development Minister John Shimmin said that the current £100,000 annual budget covered “management of the incubator programmes, premises hire, business support, website costs and hosting events etc” and is entirely funded by the Department of Economic Development.
But he pointed out that a recent independent accreditation audit had recommended that now that BIC was fully established it needed to move on to self-funding.
In further response to the Tynwald questions from Zac Hall (LVP, Onchan), Mr Shimmin said the BIC had assisted individuals and businesses in two main ways - the ‘get going’ programme for pre start-up businesses and the ‘soft landing zone’ programme aimed at attracting new inward investment from businesses and individuals based outside the Island.
Mr Shimmin added, “BIC has seen a significant increase in enquiries during the last 12 months in particular under the Soft Landing Zone programme. 56 new inward investment leads (non-resident referrals) were received (Oct to Oct) under this programme from a variety of sources.
“Fifteen of these have signed up to BIC’s Soft Landing Programme. When companies are on the programme, they are on a supported path to set up on Isle of Man, which typically takes a number of months or years.
“In relation to the organisations referred to in (i) to (iv) of part (b) of the question no formal agreements to make referrals to the Isle of Man are in place with any of those mentioned.
“As such it is not necessarily expected that leads from these links will be forthcoming. The main purpose of the links with CUEL and Microsoft BizSpark, for example, is to add value to BIC clients.”
