Building Capacity in Business Support

For effective ecodesign to happen EDC recognises the need to build capacity within existing Welsh business support organisations. To begin to understand how this can happen Arena Network kindly agreed to allow EDC to deliver an exploratory half-day session to their Business and Environment advisory team (approx 40 delegates) on 2nd November 2006 in Llandrindod Wells. The team included Business and Environment Co-ordinators (BECs), waste advisors and Envirowise Wales co-ordinators.

The key objectives were to:

• transfer knowledge and experiences in ecodesign and life cycle thinking
• gain an initial understanding of how ecodesign capacity can be built in business support advisors who focus on providing generic environmental advice
• gain an initial understanding of how these advisors can get involved in ecodesign activities in SMEs, eg through ‘asking the right question at the right time’

This session consisted of a combination of facilitated group exercises and informal presentations.

In general the feedback from the delegates was very positive, e.g. ‘excellent and interesting’, ‘excellent workshop, enthusiastic team’ and ‘good examples used’ etc. A few delegates did provide some useful constructive feedback, e.g. session ‘too long’, ‘use double sided paper’ and use ‘real products’ in workshops. One delegate felt that the EDC team were ‘preaching to the converted’.

Overall the session was of great benefit to EDC. The feedback and lessons learnt have been taken on board to enable EDC to move forward with this huge challenge.