MIT is one of the world's pre-eminent research and entrepreneurship universities, dedicated to advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. It has an open business model that welcomes partnerships and collaborations from businesses, organisations and governments around the world.

HIE has a partnership relationship with MIT that benefits from the experience onsite at MIT, but also the MIT global community through their relationships with corporate sponsors and other regions and governments around the world. MIT are renowned in their field for being entrepreneurial in culture, style and delivery.

Entrepreneurship is an evolving discipline, and MIT is at the vanguard of that evolution. From the Institute’s first “New Enterprises” course launched in 1961 to the founding of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center in 1996, MIT has played a major role in shaping modern entrepreneurial concepts and best practices. MIT are renowned in their field for being entrepreneurial in culture, style and delivery.

This business mentoring programme is tailored to the needs of H&I businesses and aims to teach core skills of entrepreneurship to address skills exchange, mindset and significantly raise ambition with in the business whilst tackling certain issues. Led by a faculty member of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the Going Global mentoring programme will encourage participants to look inside their business, understand their business plan, define their market position, perfect their sales proposition and set more ambitious goals for their business to grow, whilst developing them personally as a more confident, capable and ambitious entrepreneur.

This project fits well with the Government Economic Strategy and will impact on many of its strategic priorities. It specifically aims to address the strategic priority of creating a “Supportive Business Environment”, with particular emphasis on:

• Increasing productivity and competitiveness
• Stimulating economic participation
• Increasing GDP Growth
• Ensuring growth is shared and sustainable
• Responsive and focused enterprise support to increase the number of highly successful, competitive businesses;
• A broader approach to business innovation in Scotland that moves beyond viewing innovation as the domain of science and technology alone;
• Addressing gaps in access to capital that are constraining Scottish businesses to grow, while helping to build capacity in the investment community;
• Targeted support to business in the pursuit of opportunities outside of Scotland and the development of internationally competitive firms;