Extensive administrative data exists on the publicly funded science base in the UK in databases such as ResearchFish. This exploratory study will explore the potential to link these datasets to longitudinal small business data to enable us to examine the growth and productivity benefits of SMEs engagement with the science base.
The potential is to identify those types of interaction with the science base which have the most significant and sustained growth and productivity benefits and to look at whether these effects are uniform across different types of SMEs and projects. Are there specific types of collaborative projects, for example, which yield more significant productivity benefits? Are these benefits more concentrated in engineering than in pure science? How do firms’ engagement with ‘big science’ projects influence productivity?
