A £1 MILLION project to support digital businesses is being launched by the University of Brighton.

The Digital Research and Innovation Value Accelerator will help businesses develop links with higher education research expertise.

The aim is to demonstrate to businesses the benefits of working with knowledge-based partners.

Professor Karen Cham, the lead on DRIVA, said: “There is a bottleneck in the development of the digital economy.

“Large organisations often cannot release value from their big data as it is costly, complex and time consuming, and SMEs cannot innovate with big data as they cannot get access to it.”

DRIVA will run until January 2021.

Funding has been awarded from the Arts Council of England for another project called Arts-DRIVA.

This will focus on the arts, cultural and creative industry sector.

The university will be working with Brighton digital arts organisation Lighthouse and Wired Sussex on this.

Professor Cham said this will benefit start-ups and existing SMEs in the creative, cultural, digital and information technology sectors.

University academics are also offering their expertise to businesses taking up 5G technology.