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Summer 2019

Welcome to the latest news from the ERC.
We will be taking a newsletter break in August and return in September. 
If you want to get in touch in the meantime please visit the
ERC website 

State of Small Business Britain Conference 2019

On the 27th June the ERC welcomed over 100 delegates to The Shard for the 6th State of Small Business Britain Conference, which focused on the topical theme of ‘Strengthening Sectors’. The conference, which was chaired this year by Professor Nola Hewitt-Dundas of Queens University Belfast, covered a wide range of issues relating to the role of SMEs in the UK’s sectoral productivity and competitiveness.
Read the Conference write up here

Latest Blogs

Strengthening sectors – ERC’s 6th State of Small Business conference

Innovation and productivity:
How strong is the connection?


Small firms and formal intellectual property protection: A paradox?
Jo Turner

Read the Blog here 


Latest Publications 

Benchmarking local innovation – the innovation geography of England: 2019
ERC Report 

Firms’ ability to innovate successfully plays an important role in their ability to sustain growth and competitiveness. This report provides innovation benchmarks for local areas in England, updating our previous analysis published in 2017.
The benchmarks are based on a new analysis of data from the 14,000 firms which responded to the UK Innovation Survey 2017. The analysis is designed to provide representative results for each local economic area. Information is provided on ten benchmarks including new indicators for organisational innovation.
Three benchmarks focus on forms of organisational and marketing innovation. Three further metrics relate to the inputs and structure of firms’ innovation activity with a focus on R&D, design investment and collaboration. Arguably the most important, the remaining four metrics relate to the outcomes from firms’ innovation reflecting both the extent of innovation across the population of firms as well as the success of innovation.

Stephen Roper
Karen Bonner
 

Read the ERC Report here
Getting the right recipe: collaboration strategies for radical and incremental innovators in services.
Research Paper No 77

Successful innovation requires both effective idea generation and commercialization. Here, we investigate the benefits of alternative collaboration strategies across the idea generation and commercialization stages of the innovation process. Does collaboration generate complementarities between stages of the innovation process? Or, as external collaboration is costly and risky, can having too many partners be detrimental for innovation performance? The evidence differs significantly for radical and incremental innovators. For radical innovators we find no evidence of complementarities. High levels of radical innovation performance are associated with a single collaboration strategy: having few partners at the idea generation stage and no partners in commercialization. Incremental innovators benefit from strong complementarities, however, and a wide range of partnerships at both stages of the innovation process. Our results reflect the higher risks and complexities of collaborating for radical innovation. The results also have important practical implications: firms can choose collaboration strategies that are most likely to increase their chances of success, rather than incurring costs, taking on risks, and accumulating numerous partnerships in pursuit of sub-optimal collaboration strategies.

ERC in the Press


Financial Times   Migrants drive UK’s fastest-growing companies, study finds
Belfast Telegraph  Co-working boom will attract more businesses to city
 

Out and About

Launch of 2018
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor UK Report

Wednesday 31st July
NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator, Regents House
42 Islington High Street, London, N1 8XL

The 2018 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) supported by NatWest will be launched on Wednesday 31st July. The annual global survey is the world’s most authoritative study of entrepreneurial activity and has been running since 1999. The UK GEM will reflect and compare the entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspirations in the UK, France, Germany and the United States from 2018. It will also compare results from the countries within the UK. Speakers at the launch will include Paul Thwaite, MD Head of Sales & Specialist Businesses, NatWest & Mark Hart, Professor of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Aston Business School
Click here to register


Inside Government's Local Economic Growth Conference
Thursday 18th July

Mark Hart, Deputy Director,ERC  will be chairing the Inside Local Economic Growth Conference 2019. The conference will provide leading policy and funding updates directed towards driving economic growth within local areas. Attendees will also be given the opportunity to strategise how to drive economic growth across their local area by working in partnership across councils, universities, LEPs and businesses. Keynote speakers at this years event include Andy Burnham , Mayor of Greater Manchester, Beatrice Andrews, Head of Local Industrial Strategies, BEIS and  Rachel Tyrrell, Strength in Places Programme Director, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) 

Follow the event on #localGrowthCon

 


 
ERC convenes European research teams on
Building Business Resilience

ERC is leading a major research project, backed by the JP Morgan Chase Foundation on business resilience in under-represented groups. Following the publication of research findings for London in December 2018
Partners across Europe met in July to share research findings across Milan, Frankfurt, Paris and Madrid. The research, based on surveys of business owners, is seeking to identify the crisis plans that businesses put in place in anticipation of a potential disruption to their activities and the extent to which there are differences in approach across female- and ethnic minority-led businesses. The research will also identify the sources of information that are sought, or in retrospect, would have been helpful in managing though a crisis. The research will culminate in an assessment of business resilience across under-presented business owners, the role of place in determining resilience and the development of a toolkit that can support crisis planning, which will be launched in December 2019. Further details on the event will be available in future newsletters.


Maria Wishart, ERC research fellow based at Warwick, presented a paper entitled ‘The loneliness of seniority: moral identity work in senior business managers’ at the European Group for Organisation Studies (EGOS) conference which was held in Edinburgh, from 4th to 6th July.

Research Fellow in Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The research fellow will provide high quality research support working with other staff in Queen's Management School's Enterprise Research Group. They will be active in the planning, delivery and dissemination of research activity for a programme of research funded by the Department for the Economy Northern Ireland, and Invest NI. The focus will be on working with linked survey and administrative datasets to undertake econometric analysis on a range of policy-relevant issues related to entrepreneurship, business growth, innovation and economic development.
Click here for more information and application details. 

What's On

ERC Seminar 
10th September 12.00 - 13.30
Aston University

We are delighted to welcome guest presenter Kevin Mulligan to the September ERC Seminar. Kevin is a researcher in the field of economics, focussing on science policy and innovation. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics at the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, funded by Science Foundation Ireland & the Irish Research Council. 

Evaluating the impact of firm collaborations with publicly funded research centres on business investment in basic and applied research.
Publicly funded research centres play an important role in innovation systems as an intermediary between industry and the national science base. This paper evaluates the impact of firm collaborations with publicly funded research centres on business investment in basic and applied research.
Click here to register to attend the seminar



Longitudinal Small Business Survey Research Showcase
19th September 12.00 - 16.00
17th Floor, WBS London, The Shard

The Longitudinal Small Business Survey (LSBS) is the UK’s ‘gold standard’ data for all aspects of SME growth and productivity. This workshop provides an opportunity to hear from five of the UK’s leading SME researchers about how they are using this data in their research.
Click here for more information and to register 


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