Last year, the government apparently spent £12bn on supporting small businesses. If you are an IT manager in a small business, you and your fellow executives might wonder what happened to your share.

It is not easy running a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) at the best of times. Coping with scarce resources, prioritising limited cash, finding new customers, keeping investors happy – each alone is a full-time job before you even start to consider how to put together an IT strategy to support and enable growth.

Last week, Computing hosted a web seminar on IT innovation for SMEs, with an expert panel that included some of the most influential advisers to small businesses and startups. At times, their frustration was tangible.

All are successful business people in their own right, and all have helped others develop successful startups. Julie Meyer, for example, chief executive of Ariadne Capital, set up and later sold the investor networking group First Tuesday, which helped so many internet startups get a foot on the ladder. She has also advised Skype on its road to success.

Meyer’s advice for an aspiring SME? Well, for one, do

not go to the government or quangos such as BusinessLink, she says. Instead, talk to your peers, to entrepreneurs, to people who have been there and done it.

Doug Richards is the chairman and founder of advisory company Library House, and a former panellist on the BBC2 programme Dragons’ Den. ‘The business of supporting small businesses has become a very large business in the UK,’ he says. The politicians in charge of helping SMEs are very modest about their achievements – because they have plenty to be modest about, he adds.

It should be noted that Richards has recently led a small business task force on behalf of the Conservative party, but his views are neither unique nor entirely political.

As management consultant and author David Hall pointed out in the seminar, 95 per cent of all innovations in the past 100 years have come from businesses that employ fewer than 20 people. UK SMEs are full of entrepreneurs, ideas people and creative thinkers who can help this country close our 40 per cent productivity gap with the US, if only we would allow them.

IT innovation has a critical role to play in firms of any size, but for the under-resourced and overworked SME IT manager, it is the only way to succeed.