INVEST NI

Invest Northern Ireland is Northern Ireland’s economic development agency. Our overall goal is to help create wealth for the benefit of the whole community by strengthening the economy and helping it grow.

We do this by supporting business development, helping to increase export levels, attracting high quality inward investment, and stimulating a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Specifically we want to increase business productivity and boost Northern Ireland’s Gross Value Added (GVA) per employee, which is around 20 per cent lower than the UK average. GVA is the contribution each employee makes to the economy, and increasing it will help to generate wealth for the benefit of the whole community.

We are part of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI). Our task is to effectively and efficiently deliver the Government’s economic development strategies.

We take a three-strand approach:

We help our clients, who are all export focused, to get bigger, more profitable and more internationally competitive so that they can pay the higher salaries that create increased wealth.

We target inward investment from key high-value sectors such as ICT and financial services; and help niche manufacturing companies increase their contribution to the economy.

We support the commercialisation of leading-edge research and development in specialist fields. Over the long-term this will deliver significant benefit for the economy.

We are confident that this approach will maximise the impact of our efforts and help Northern Ireland move towards the goal of being a robust, private sector dominated economy.

We also work with a number of organisations at a local, national and international level to:

help build the infrastructure required for successful research and development; encourage entrepreneurship; develop sectoral and cross-sectoral support mechanisms; help develop skills.