ERC News, Publications and Events

Enterprise Research Centre September newsletter

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The Sociology of Enterprise

New Research by the Enterprise Research Centre for BIS finds that a business owner’s ‘growth disposition’ can drive business performance and actual business growth.

Drawing on social theory, this innovative study looked at whether small business owners exhibit different dispositions regarding growth and, if so, whether and how these affect their mind-sets, business behaviours (i.e. management practices) and subsequently the performance of their businesses. One hundred in-depth personal interviews were undertaken with small business owners in early 2015. The findings show that there is a spectrum of dispositions towards growth among small business owners and these are influenced by demographics (gender, socio-economic status, etc.), family background, education, cultural norms and the scale and nature of international links. Dispositions shape the ‘mind-sets’ of business owners and these are associated with different levels of ambition and different business behaviours.
Within the spectrum, there are 3 broad identifiable categories of business owners: the growth-inclined, growth-ambivalent and growth-resistant.

Read the full report here

How Innovative is your average lawyer?

Legal professionals are becoming more innovative in running their businesses but more is needed a new report indicates. Findings from the largest ever study of innovation in the legal sector, commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority ( SRA) and the Legal Services Board ( LSB), suggest that legal professionals including solicitors and barristers are becoming more innovative in the organisation and management of their business.The study was undertaken on behalf of the SRA and LSB by the Enterprise Research Centre at Warwick Business School.

Downoad Exec Summary and full report here

SMES :
How Professional management skills can grow your business.

Research shows that a lack of management skills is responsible for 56% of small business failures, yet just one in three businesses with 5-24 employees have provided management training in the last 12 months.

Growing Your Small Business connects SMEs with their local business schools and provides the information they need to raise their level of professional management and leadership skills to boost productivity and growth.

Small business metrics developed by ERC's Mark Hart and Karen Bonner contributed to the UK Heat Map featured in Chartered Management Institute ( CMI ) report " Growing your Small Business " published on September 16th 2015.

Read the full report here

Latest Publications

Investigating Schumpeter’s creative army: what drives new-to-the-market innovation in micro-enterprises?
Research Paper 36

Stephen Roper
University of Warwick
stephen.roper@wbs.ac.uk

Nola Hewitt-Dundas
Queen’s University Belfast
Nm.Hewitt@qub.ac.uk

Schumpeterian arguments related to creative destruction place small, entrepreneurial firms at the centre of the innovation process. The exclusion of micro-enterprises (with less than 10 employees) from most innovation surveys means, however, that we know relatively little about innovation among this group of firms. Here, using new survey data on a thousand micro-enterprises we explore the determinants of new-to-the-market innovation, the basis for the Schumpeterian creative destruction (CD) process. Our results provide strong support for the interactive nature of micro-enterprise innovation and suggest the potential value of developing a model of interactive creative destruction (ICD). Our results also suggest that family-owned firms are more likely to introduce new-to-the-market innovations and therefore play an important role in the ICD process. In organisational terms, our analysis emphasises the range of technical and co-ordination capabilities required by micro-enterprises to innovate successfully. Policy implications relate to promoting awareness among micro-firms of the support available for innovation to reduce the impact of financial and risk constraints.

Click here to read the full paper

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ERC Conference papers

ERC will be at
ISBE 2015,Glasgow , November 11th & 12th with papers accepted for ERC collegues.

Gertner. D, Ram. M and Trehan. K (2015)
The Link between proximity, business support and ethnic entrepreneurship

Parkes.G , Hart. M and Rudd,J (2015)
Psychometrics and the prediction of entrepreneurial funding resource orchestration.

Roper.S , Hewitt-Dundas.N (2015)
Investigating Schumpeter's creative army: what drives new-to-the-market innovation in micro-enterprises?

Anyadike Danes. M ,
Hart. M.
Getting under the hood: firm and job dynamics in the UK before, during and after the Great Recession

Michael Anyadike Danes will be presenting at
The biennial Comparative Analysis of Enterprise Data, a prestigious
international conference for researchers working on firm level data to be held in Istanbul
23rd - 25th October.
Anyadike Danes. M ,
Hart. M.
" Fecundity, fertility, survival and growth: high growth firms and their contribution to job creation, a demographic perspective."

Other News

ERC at conference

Mark Hart and Stephen Roper are both participating in fringe events at the Conservative Party Conference on October 6th 2015.

Mark Hart is one of the key speakers at an evening event hosted by Bright Blue in partnership with the IPSE entitled: “Going it alone: supporting self-employed Britain".

Stephen Roper has been invited by the New Statesman to contribute to a lunch-time event focusing on the future of small business in Britain.

Invest NI Workshop on Enterprise
28th September 2015

Mark Hart presented the latest GEM findings at an internal workshop for Invest NI business development staff and summarised some key elements of other recent ERC research. The Growth Dashboard and Innovation Benchmark report were highlighted as was the work on the importance of Leadership and Management Skills for SME development and growth. This workshop was convened as part of the development work for Invest NI’s new Corporate Plan for the period 2016-2020.

Save the Date

Supporting micro-innovation evidence and policy.
November 5th 5-7pm
Riddel Hall,
Queens University, Belfast.

ERC in partnership with the Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment Belfast is organising a seminar to examine recent evidence and research and consider related policy options.
Further details to be released soon.