The time has come to sharpen the focus on productivity

Raising productivity is often cited as one of the UK’s most important economic challenges. On the surface of it, improving productivity sounds like a pretty straightforward idea to grasp. It’s about economies, workplaces and people being more efficient, increasing the volume of goods created in relation to the inputs used to produce them. But in… Read more

Business, Growth and Productivity workshop

On September 23rd ERC headed to Glasgow to run a workshop on all things small business, growth and productivity. The day was coordinated by Scottish Enterprise and brought in key agencies and partners in Scotland with a stake in the performance of the small business community and those who support it directly through policy delivery,… Read more

What’s happening to finance in an uncertain world?

This week saw the launch of the latest results of the SME Finance Monitor, produced by BVA BDRC . In the first half of this year, it seems that financing behaviours have been shifting across the SME sector. This movement comes after a long period of relative stability. The survey responses add further colour to… Read more

UK Local Growth Dashboard 2019

The UK Local Growth Dashboard published today has been developed by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) and builds on the LEP Growth Dashboard first launched in June 2014.  Its purpose is to present a set of growth metrics for start-ups and existing firms across a range of sub-national geographies in the UK with a specific… Read more

GEM UK 2018 Press Coverage

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GEM 2018 Report Launched

NatWest, Aston Business School and The Entrepreneurs Network launch the 2018 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) today at NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator Speakers at the launch include Paul Thwaite, MD Head of Sales & Specialist Businesses, NatWest & Mark Hart, Professor of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Aston Business School who leads on the GEM UK project and is… Read more

Getting the right recipe: collaboration strategies for radical and incremental innovators in services.

ERC Research Paper No 77 is published today. 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,… Read more

ERC Conference 2019 – Strengthening Sectors

On the 27th June the ERC welcomed over 100 delegates to The Shard for the 6th State of Small Business Britain Conference, which this year 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… Read more

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

Understanding small business dynamics is central to our work at the Enterprise Research Centre and once a year we gather at the Shard in London with 150 researchers, stakeholders, policy makers and small business owners to discuss and debate the state of the small business community. The sixth of these events was held at the… Read more

State of Small Business Britain Report 2019

The State of Small Business Britain report 2019  has been launched at the 6th Annual State of Small Business Britain conference held by the ERC. The increasing levels of political uncertainty in the UK sets the context for this review of trends in the small business community in mid-2019. We seek to provide an overview… Read more