Bridging the Equity Gap from SME in Scotland
Nelson was selected to present a paper entitled “Bridging The Equity Gap for SME’s in Scotland” under the theme “How to design and implement innovative financial instruments to support future oriented development” at the New Horizons in Graz – Shaping Best Practice IV conference 2006. This major international conference “brought together practitioners from across the 25 EU Member States as well as Bulgaria and Romania. The conference was organised to showcase best practice in the in the development and implementation of EU Structural Funds.

The emphasis was on projects promoting innovation in small and medium enterprises, cooperation between public research and businesses in the form of regional knowledge clusters, local innovation centres or start-up schemes, access to venture capital and micro-credits and other initiatives at regional and local level that promote human capital and the building of the knowledge society.