The Innovation Exchange, the initiative that connects large businesses facing innovation challenges with SMEs that can fast track the solutions, has announced that there are now 15 large businesses on board, with another 10 in the pipeline.  160 innovative SMEs, comprising start-up and scale-up technology companies, have also joined the programme that was launched in February to accelerate business development for SMEs and innovation for larger businesses. The Innovation Exchange is delivered by Dublin BIC in partnership with Skillnet Ireland.

Dawn Farms, AXA Ireland, SSE Airtricity and iNua Hotel Group are the most recent to sign up, joining Ryanair, Glanbia, An Post, Musgrave and many others. Solutions are being sought in the area of digital transformation and specifically around automation, analytics, cybersecurity, process engineering, business efficiencies and much more.

The SMEs in The Innovation Exchange are at the leading edge of digital transformation across all industry sectors from manufacturing to retail. They have capability to solve challenges by harnessing emerging technologies such as IoT, AR, data analytics and AI to solve problems for big business in the areas of sustainability, energy, big data, workflow management, recruitment and retention.

The SME innovators, which include well established technology solutions providers as well as start-ups and scale-ups that are developing the next wave of distributive and transformative solutions, get access to a customer pipeline and to a framework that develops their capability to navigate sales and procurement through specialised, tailor-made training videos and masterclasses.