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

August 2019 Press Coverage

100 Stories Blog 01/08/2019  4 things we learned about entrepreneurs from the 2018 GEM report The Business Post 11/08/2019 The economy is booming, but it’s all down to foreign giants Insights – PodCast 14/08/2019 Are Irish business owners content to stay small?    

GEM UK 2018 Press Coverage

BQ  Live  31/07/2019 Gig economy “a springboard for entrepreneurs” 100 Stories Blog 01/08/2019 4 things we learned about entrepreneurs from the 2018 GEM report    

July 2019 Press Coverage

Financial Times 11/07/2019 Migrants drive UK’s fastest-growing companies, study finds

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

Gig economy “a springboard for entrepreneurs”

• Gig workers in the UK are twice as likely as the wider population to be in the early stages of setting up a business, largest global study of entrepreneurs finds • Sharp fall in entrepreneurship among BAME Britons and immigrants • Rise of crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending sees people increasingly willing to invest in “strangers with… Read more

Small firms and formal intellectual property protection: A paradox?

We know that firms use knowledge protection mechanisms to limit imitation and enhance their ability to appropriate the returns to their innovative investments. Recent research at the ERC suggests that both formal (e.g. patents) and informal (e.g. secrecy) knowledge protection mechanisms are important for the innovation returns of small firms (those with fewer than 50… 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