The North West Regional College (NWRC) Business Support Centre (BSC) assists businesses from fledgling entrepreneurs and micro companies, to long-standing indigenous and multinational and foreign direct investment (FDI) businesses with tailored solutions to meet their needs.

The BSC offers support to industry in two main ways:

  • Our Innovation and Skills Centres assist businesses to source funding to support upskilling and mentoring in applied innovation, research and development and then foster innovation by delivering tailored solutions, with the skills and knowledge required, in areas of new product, process or service development, to support businesses to be more innovative and competitive.
  • Our Skills team support businesses to identify their skills needs through a training needs analysis and tailor bespoke training and upskilling specific to the business needs. Many of these skills courses are in priority areas and linked to employment opportunities.

At the NWRC we are committed to encouraging and stimulating innovation through upskilling and mentoring in new product development and process or service improvement. The NWRC has 5 dedicated innovation and skills centres across the specialist areas of Food & Hospitality, Manufacturing & Engineering, Extended Reality (XR), Health & Care and Industry 4.0 Automation, that deliver high-quality skills and innovation support to students, entrepreneurs, industry and the wider economy. These are the:

The support available for early-stage entrepreneurs, micro and SMEs includes:

  • Bespoke upskilling and training and one-to-one mentoring
  • Access to state-of-the-art equipment and industry-standard workshops including new technology demonstrations and NWRC staff with the associated skills
  • Technical staff with knowledge and expertise in idea generation, proof of concept creation and prototype development right through to scale-up of production
  • Conducting industry applied research and development (r&D)

With the support of the BSC team, we aim to assist business to find new markets, scale-up production and to rapidly and effectively bring new ideas and products to market to increase sales, reduce costs, access new markets while enhancing workforce skills and creating employment. In doing so, the NWRC is supporting the Department for the Economy NI’s vision for a 10X economy.