UK SBS FWRECR17062INN - Young Entrepreneurs from Diverse Backgrounds

Following the exceptional success with Women in Innovation, our next infocus action is a campaign and awards programme to engage young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and to find and support innovators of the future within this group.

This campaign will be in partnership with the Prince's Trust who have over 40 years experience and an impressive track record of success in working with the young people we are seeking to engage.

We will raise awareness of opportunities and encourage the generation of new ideas for business innovation.

Our aims include to:

There are two key elements to the campaign:

1. We will launch a high profile PR campaign and targeted outreach programme to highlight the partnership with the Prince's Trust, the opportunities presented in the awards programme and opportunities in innovation more widely. We will seek out young people who could benefit from the support available from Prince's Trust and Innovate UK and drive them towards the Princes Trust's new 'PT Online' digital platform for enterprise support on which we will host content specific to opportunities in innovation.

2. We will identify a cohort of young people in each region of the UK to take part in a regional programme to inspire, immerse in innovation and explore challenges. We will invite all participants in the regional programmes to submit their ideas for business innovation and we provide awards to the young people whose ideas are judged to have the greatest potential. We will support all award holders to be role models to encourage more young people to strive and succeed and think about business innovation as an opportunity.

The aim of this tender is two-fold:

1. An internal intelligence piece that gives us vital learnings on the digital behaviours of our target audience and messaging that resonates best with them.

2. An external publishable report that looks at the barriers for our target audience to engage in enterprise and business innovation and tangible ways to overcome these.

Our target audience is 18-30 year olds who are from disadvantaged backgrounds and are not in education, training or sustainable employment. They may be under employed (defined as working part time but looking for more hours of work - this could include zero hours contracts) or in less secure employment (fixed term contracts). The aim for the Prince's Trust is for these individuals to gain support resulting in a positive outcome - whether that be employment, training or education. For Innovate UK, our aim is to encourage them to think innovatively to elevate their business ideas.

Demonstrating ability to reach this target audience in order to complete this research will be vital to a successful tender.