Government expands Google partnership for SME export drive

Department for International Trade to work with internet giant to help small businesses cash in on overseas opportunities

Credit: PA

The government is to expand its partnership with Google in a bid to help UK SMEs make the most of export opportunities.

The Department for International Trade’s Exporting is GREAT campaign will work with the internet firm’s newly launched Digital Garage initiative to host an “exporting education series” of events next year. About 2,000 small businesses are expected to attend the training, which will be hosted at sites in Manchester, Edinburgh, and “on university campuses around the UK”, the government said.

The training programme will encompass three modules, covering “finding global opportunities, setting up new export operations, and marketing”.

Google has already worked in partnership with DIT to build the online Market Finder service, which aims to help SMEs identify opportunities to sell goods and services overseas.


Related content


Baroness Fairhead, a minister of state at DIT who attended the launch of the Digital Garage programme in London this week, said: “This exciting initiative between Google and the GREAT campaign will give SMEs up and down the country the opportunity to gain valuable insights into how to start or expand their export operations.”

This week DIT also announced that it has selected a dozen UK firms in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space to join a trade mission to the US next month. The chosen companies will visit New York between 3 and 7 December, where they will attend the annual AI Summit. The government hopes that the UK outfits will have the chance to meet with US peers, learn about the requirements of trading overseas, and “connect with influencers in the New York tech community”.

Her Majesty’s consul general in New York and trade commissioner for North America Antony Phillipson said: “This summit is a wonderful opportunity to showcase some of the leading UK AI companies and provide them with a platform to develop key partnerships in the US. The UK is a global leader in AI, and one of the four Grand Challenges in our modern Industrial Strategy, which focuses on driving international trade and investment in emerging fields to secure a prosperous future for the UK and its partners in the global economy.”

The firms that will join the trade mission are: Kainos; Luminance; Peak; Ravelin; re:infer; Smartology; Speechmatics; StatusToday; Tessian; Velocity Black; and Volume.ai.

Sam Trendall

Learn More →

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Processing...
Thank you! Your subscription has been confirmed. You'll hear from us soon.
Subscribe to our newsletter
ErrorHere