Seeking, Acting on and Appreciating the Value of Business Advice

Kevin Mole

This presentation was a preliminary view of the aspects that contributed towards the value of advice from the client’s point of view. The paper suggested that there were benefits beyond the knowledge gaps that were important for business owners.

The link between proximity, business support and ethnic entrepreneurship

Drew Gertner, Monder Ram, Kiran Trehan

The main aim of the paper is to more broadly understand how a relational approach helps entrepreneurship research better understand contexts in which firms are embedded. We unpack this issue using EMBs and their engagement with business support actors. The key findings of the paper demonstrate that:

    • Minority entrepreneurs’ relations with support providers are characterised by more than just ethnic/cultural proximity but by a range of proximities, including: geographical, cognitive, organizational, social and institutional. This suggests that the resource mobilisation process of ethnic entrepreneurs is more similar to non-ethnic entrepreneurs than the literature currently suggests.
    • There are differences in the importance of proximity dimensions in high and low value-added sectors which is based on the regulatory environment of the sector and its knowledge intensity.
    • There are ‘dark sides’ to different types of proximity including social and ethnic/cultural proximity which are often over-romanticised in the literature as it relates to ethnic minority entrepreneur.

Psychometrics and the prediction of entrepreneurial funding resource orchestration

Geoff Parkes, Mark Hart, John Rudd

This paper asks the question: Can psychometric testing be used to explain, predict and measure entrepreneurial funding resource orchestration? With some of the conclusions being:

  • Working with Others: Being able to Work with others provides opportunities to access finance (and also self-finance).
  • Communicating, Meeting and Presenting: Being a good communicator can facilitate access to finance.
  • Innovating and Creating: Innovating and creative skills open up more opportunities for access to finance (in particular new forms of finance).
  • Problem Solving: An entrepreneur who can problem solve is better able to access finance (and is better able to self-fund and not require external finance).

Investigating Schumpeter’s creative army: What drives new-to-the-market innovation in micro-enterprises?

Stephen Roper, Nola Hewitt-Dundas

This paper asks the question: Can psychometric testing be used to explain, predict and measure entrepreneurial funding resource orchestration? With some of the conclusions being:

  • Working with Others: Being able to Work with others provides opportunities to access finance (and also self-finance).
  • Communicating, Meeting and Presenting: Being a good communicator can facilitate access to finance.
  • Innovating and Creating: Innovating and creative skills open up more opportunities for access to finance (in particular new forms of finance).
  • Problem Solving: An entrepreneur who can problem solve is better able to access finance (and is better able to self-fund and not require external finance).

Getting in under the hood: firm and job dynamics in the UK before, during and after the ’Great Recession’

Michael Anyadike Danes & Mark Hart

Over much of the period 1998 to 2014, the average size of firms in the UK, changed very little. Even during the Great Recession period average size was virtually constant, so changes in jobs were driven almost entirely by changes in the stock of firms. What made the Great Recession period distinctive was a ‘collapse’ in business births, which fell by 25% between 2008 and 2009. This translates into a ‘loss’ of about a quarter of million jobs. In the following year the 2009 drop in births pushed the stock of continuing firms down by about 60,000 and a further 170,000 jobs were ‘lost’. The upturn in firm births in 2012 signalled the beginning of the recovery.