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Business Support

Getting to grips with good looks.

Gordon Ollivere, an avid champion of the North East's potentials, is anxious. Business organisations are reducing branches and the North East's suffering, he says. Although manufacturing is more important here as a percentage of regional GDP than in most other regions, the R&D and product development in support tends to be located elsewhere.

Now he, Mike Dowson and a team at RTC North are tackling this through RTC North’s role as co-ordinator of Design Network North, and through the opening in 2011 of Design Centre North, a research centre where, hopefully, clever but practical design will give North East – indeed British products – added value against global competition and its price cutting.

Ollivere has been the driving force behind RTC North’s 20 years of success as one of the UK’s outstanding independents working on technology transfer and innovation. Dowson, director of Design Centre North, was formerly head designer at Draeger, the international specialist in safety and medical technology.

They aim to turn the trade tide from the new centre at Gateshead. They aim to prove to big and growing business that, by following the examples of Procter and Gamble, Akzo Nobel, Black and Decker, Berghaus and Thorn – major names demonstrating already the value of the North East as an R&D centre – they too will reap benefits, both through cost effectiveness and through design talent nurtured in our region.

A pilot project there is also creating a web environment suited to bringing business growth, opportunities and productivity to the region’s design and business sectors.

Teesside University’s Centre for Design in the Digital Economy (DLab) is setting up a 3D virtual and online Northern Design Centre, enabling the centre and its surrounding businesses to grow and support design ventures and SMEs.

Look out for opportunity!

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