Investing in product and service innovation is a key driver of economic growth.

The cost of that investment, in the form of time, skills and cash, however often restricts the drive for competitiveness and long-term success.

The recent Lloyds Bank SME survey concluded there was a real need for "concerted and collaborative" action within the local innovation ecosystem, something which Innovation Birmingham continues to address with the four Cs: connect, communicate, collaborate and create.

With the opening of iCentrum at the end of March, Birmingham will have a focal point for action on this agenda.

With Innovation Birmingham as the animateur, working with local, national and international partners, iCentrum will create an open, challenge-led environment to drive innovation by working with existing businesses and creating new ones.

Our open approach to the four Cs is not only driven by aggregating talent and skills to match with needs on campus, nor within corporate boundaries, we also look to engage with regional businesses through an innovation membership model and utilise the latest communications tools to connect across the region - indeed across the globe - to bring innovative solutions to address market needs.

This will provide the region's SMEs with an open 'skunk-works' as a means of creating innovative solutions to limiting concerns about growth rate at an affordable cost.

The environment will catalyse the combining and re-combining of 'possibles' - not just new ideas but also remixing old - in an environment free from normal organisational constraints and by enabling access to external skills.

Through this route, to quote Joseph Schumpeter, we will harness "the creative destruction wrought by entrepreneurs in close proximity to one another (which) was the driving force for progress" which goes back to the very foundations of Birmingham during the Industrial Revolution.

David Hardman is chief executive of Innovation Birmingham