Community over Competition

In a recent Chamber Chat with Lancaster and Morecambe Chamber of Commerce, Kate spoke about community and why we need them from an individual and business perspective.

We spoke about our experience of being a founding member of a cluster that was created out of necessity. The Electech Innovation Cluster brought together skill specific businesses, education providers and those from the public sector to work on solutions for problems that were impacting all of us. This hasn’t happened overnight, it’s taken time, transparency and trust from everyone involved. By remaining open and sharing our knowledge, skills and connections, it’s grown steadily and the Electech Innovation Cluster recently welcomed 175 people to their Annual Conference.

Different communities can also lean on one another for support and learn from each other. Within our business we try to foster this mindset, lead by example and learn from others. We’re not perfect and within a tender process, as an SME we are often ‘competing’ against other larger businesses, but our community work has contributed to some of our successful bids. It’s also improved the skill set of the people working within Like Technologies, most recently demonstrated by the recent visit from a group of learners from Lancaster and Morecambe College.

The group were shown round by our Workshop Manager. Our Engineers did a short demonstration in our workshop and told the group about their different routes into electronics, and our Apprentices led the hands-on task in our training room. It was a team effort that demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the communities we’re part of.