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WHO WE ARE
Flint Innovation was founded in September 2019 by Liz Flint.
Liz is an innovation expert with a long track record of working at the interface of business, academia, and Government.
Since then, Flint Innovation has grown to become a hub for a group of specialist consultants to collaborate as Associates. Across the group the team covers specialisms including coaching, careers advice, public sector strategy, business mentoring, Higher Education strategy, training, IP commercialisation, innovation strategy and tools, and more.
Our clients include Government and Universities as well as the private sector.
We are currently part of the delivery team for the Government’s flagship Help to Grow programme. Liz and her Associates teach sessions on the programme as well as facilitating cohorts and mentoring individuals. We also develop and deliver training and coaching to start-up companies.
We also act as Monitoring Officers for Innovate UK, and have experience of assessing funding bids as well as supporting successful projects.
MEET THE TEAM
LIZ FLINT
Founder
Liz is the founder of Flint Innovation and has twenty years of experience at the intersection of business, academia, and Government.
Liz is passionate about helping organisations and individuals to thrive, and has spent her career on just that. She's built new organisations from the ground up, taken existing organisations in a new direction, and built happy, high-functioning teams in a range of settings.
She believes in empowering people, harnessing innovation to improve productivity, and cutting through the noise to find and make the changes with the greatest impact for people and places.
Liz covers areas including:
Strategy development and implementation, Bid writing, Small business start-up and growth strategies and planning, Coaching and mentoring SMEs, Training and workshop delivery
COLM WATLING
Associate
With over 20 years in sales and business development across a range of industries, Colm has been helping academic start-ups to get out of the lab and make their first sales since 2008. Colm has mentored teams and businesses from a number of universities and delivered on Innovate UK's ICURe programme.
Colm's areas of expertise include business modelling, business development and grant writing.
DR DANI HILLIARD
Associate
Dani has been working in education for over 30 years and is passionate about helping students to succeed academically whilst instilling in them the important soft skills of resilience and critical thinking
Dani’s business – Argue to Think – is based on her PhD research. Working as consultant she has delivered training sessions to undergraduates at the University of Bristol and University of South Wales; 1-2-1 support to students reading for degrees at the universities of Sussex, Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham Trent and the UEA; and a workshop to Hughes Hall Cambridge Enterprise Society. She has mentored Masters’ students at the University of Bristol as they prepared their Education dissertations and has delivered training days to the University of Exeter Doctoral College helping international PhD students grapple with Western forms of critical thinking and written argumentation. She has worked with researchers on a variety of different projects; two within the University of Exeter, one within the University of Swansea and has recently supported a team within the London School of Economics.
STEVE BLAKE
Associate
Steve is on a mission to make IP easy for technology businesses to engage with. He spent a number of years as a partner at Marks & Clerk LLP, sitting on their Board, and was Managing Partner of their Birmingham Office.
Looking at the profession, Steve thought the traditional model needed some tweaking so he set up a new firm, Matter, with 3 clear aims:
1) take away the pain of spiralling IP costs
2) remove complexity and
3) help businesses understand and manage their own IP themselves.
