Transform Your Design Business: Design Victoria Launches Grants and Assistance Resource
September 30, 2009 | Levent OZLER
Transform Your Design Business is an online guide that equips Victorian designers with the know-how to successfully navigate the grants space and write strong grant applications. It seeks to ensure designers can take full advantage of grants and assistance available to them, to help fund new design initiatives for local and international markets and kick-start growth and success.
Transform Your Design Business provides valuable insight into the grants process and offers tips for developing stand-out applications. It includes a range of grants that designers may be eligible for, including information on closing dates, eligibility criteria and grant providers.
To assist designers in determining which grants are right for their businesses, each grant listing identifies the stage of business the grant is most applicable to (for example, viability and prototyping or export) and features a rating that indicates the time, effort and skill required to submit an application.
"In a recent Design Victoria survey 81% of designers indicated they had never applied for a grant, most commonly due to a lack of awareness of grants available. A large number also indicated that they didn't know where to look or who to speak to*," said Michele Azzopardi, Director, Design Victoria. "Designers seldom have the time or resources to spend trawling websites for grants and assistance opportunities or writing lengthy applications with no certainty of success. With this in mind we developed Transform Your Design Business." The right grant can transform a design business, providing much-needed funds to get a project off the ground, start-up a design business, commercialise intellectual property or export. For many ventures it can mean the difference between success and failure.
"Exporting can be expensive but it may not be as unachievable as some think. The Export Market Development Grants scheme, a Federal Government financial assistance program administrated by Austrade, is not only able to assist design firms to develop export markets, but also provides financial assistance with intellectual property protection costs," said Stan Roche, Senior Adviser, Austrade.
Transform Your Design Business was designed by Studio Pip and Co and officially launched on 30 September 2009.
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