‘Productivity from Below: Addressing the Productivity Challenges of Microbusinesses’.

The ERC are delighted to be involved in leading elements of the ‘Productivity from below: addressing the productivity challenges of microbusinesses‘ project, working with Monder Ram at CREME. Bringing together three leading research centres: the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME), the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) and City-REDI (Regional Economic Development Institute) CREME… Read more

Small Business Owner or Entrepreneur and why it matters?

Mark Hart contributed to an article on Forbes.com published today examining the labels used by and to describe business owners. Mark said “Not content with working out whether someone running a business is an entrepreneur or not we have now got a proliferation of labels to describe a particular demographic group the ‘entrepreneur’ is hailing… Read more

Minority-led firms more likely to face “survival threats”

New study by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) of 600 London firms finds 48% of businesses run by ethnic minority leaders suffered a major crisis in past five years. Data on different types of entrepreneur provides basis for new toolkit to help businesses become more resilient to threats. With Brexit uncertainty continuing, study hopes to… Read more

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