HELENSBURGH could become home to an 'innovation hub' to encourage local small business growth, if an idea suggested at a meeting of Helensburgh Community Council comes to fruition.

Community councillor Nigel Millar presented last week’s meeting with a vision of what they hub would look like and how it would work.

The idea is to create the hub within Helensburgh library to support start-up businesses and bring ideas from theory to the market place.

People would pay to use the hub and the facilities where they would have access to business advice, mentors, areas for networking, high speed broadband, sources of finance and a potential customer base.

Members of the community council believe that now is the time to get something like this up and running to help attract young people, encourage women in business and have somewhere that retired but well qualified and trained naval personnel can continue to work.

Mr Millar told the meeting: “This is an idea whose time has come and it’s coming fast. We want to meet demand.”

Mr Millar has applied for funding needed to produce a feasibility study. He will find out if they have been successful in April and will take the idea from there.