Awards can help Welsh businesses get off to a great start
THE third annual Wales Start-Up Awards were recently launched, giving new Welsh businesses the opportunity to showcase their successes and demonstrate their contribution to job-creation, creativity and innovation in the economy.
Covering the full spectrum of business sectors including food and drink, social enterprise, digital and life sciences, the Wales Start-Up Awards give new enterprises the opportunity to enter in 15 categories while shining a light on Wales’ fast-growing and buoyant start-up community.
As the only regional awards in the UK to focus on start-ups, they are unique in that only new businesses launched within the past three years are eligible to enter.
Last year’s winner of the StartUp Awards was Felin Honeybees of Anglesey, which also won the Green and North Wales Start-Up awards at the event held at the Depot in Cardiff.
Founded in 2016 by Katie Hayward, it has successfully brought the concept of beekeeping into the mainstream through a series of initiatives aimed at educating and informing the general public and wider farming community about the important role bees play within the ecosystem.
Start-ups are important to the economic development of all nations. Research shows that firms less than five years old create the vast majority of net jobs in an economy, are responsible for disruptive innovation across a range of sectors and are the regenerative force in many local communities.
The importance of entrepreneurship has recently been recognised in wales through the establishment of Be The Spark, a movement that aims to stimulate and engage everyone in the Welsh entrepreneurial ecosystem to drive entrepreneurship across the whole country.
But where are we in terms of encouraging greater enterprise in the Welsh economy, especially in relation to the rest of the UK?
According to the authoritative