UK Shared Prosperity Fund an opportunity to rebalance growth

Future business support funding after Brexit should help to rebalance growth across the UK, targeting more deprived areas across the country, where firms have significantly lower turnover. Sharing Prosperity, a new report from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) and the Enterprise Research Centre, says it is critical that funding levels are not cut when… Read more

New data on SMEs in Northern Ireland

The ERC launched some new data on SMEs in Northern Ireland at the Entrepreneurship in Action event organised by Invest Northern Ireland in Armagh on 12th November. Nola Hewitt-Dundas presented findings from the Micro-business Northern Ireland report, and Karen Bonner presented findings from the Northern Ireland Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report. On the same day… Read more

GEM UK: Northern Ireland Report 2017

Authored by ERCs Mark Hart , Karen Bonner , Jonathan Levie and Laura Heery  the Northern Ireland element of the annual report, is being launched today, Monday November 12th  at the Entrepreneurship in Action event held at the Marketplace Theatre & Arts Centre, Armagh. In 2017 the Department for the Economy and Invest NI sponsored the Northern Ireland component of the GEM… Read more

Northern Ireland’s enterprise progress threatened by Brexit uncertainty

Brexit’s risk to recent positive trends among Northern Ireland’s entrepreneurs and micro-firms has been spelt out in new research. The two studies by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) and Queen’s Management School show that the number of people in Northern Ireland becoming entrepreneurs has risen significantly in recent years, while its micro-firms (those employing 1-9 people) are the… Read more

Financial Times special report on the UK’s entrepreneurs

ERC data features in today’s Financial Times special report on the UK’s entrepreneurs: Belfast stands out for start-up productivity.   While Belfast still struggles to foster companies that survive for at least three years, this year’s data from the Enterprise Research Centre show that Northern Ireland performs above the UK average in other key metrics… Read more

Latest SOTA reviews from ERC

This week sees a further two SOTAs published in the new series. Each ERC SOTA Review provides a short briefing on a tightly-defined topic, drawing on the most recent research and policy literature. The reviews clearly summarise the main evidence points, provide an indication of robustness for each evidence point and identify key uncertainties and… Read more

What is the State of The Art (SOTA)?

We are working in an increasingly fast-paced world in which more and more information is becoming available from multiple sources. For many of us, this situation makes it difficult to keep on top of complex issues and debates and identify trustworthy and reliable information. To help, the Enterprise Research Centre is today launching a new… Read more

Longitudinal Small Business Survey. Call for proposals 2018

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy has made available  £25,000 to fund five secondary analyses of the first three waves of the Longitudinal Small Business Survey. The Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) is administering this call on behalf of BEIS. Note that applications will not be accepted from anyone who is being supported through… Read more

Spin-outs and the great university challenge

ERC research cited in article by James Hurley in the Times,  September 10th  2018. A 2015 study into spin-outs by the Enterprise Research Centre found that for the “majority of academic founders” there were “significant tensions” between their commitments to university academic work and the demands of the embryonic company. Research paper No 35:  Profiling UK… Read more

On the value of daughters

Having a daughter can be a delight. I should know I have two. It turns out however that having a daughter is not only a delight but that it can also have a significant effect on the decisions we make about how we run our organisations and businesses. A fascinating new research paper describes what… Read more