Recently I visited a company that had performed rather well during the lockdown. One of the lucky ones, its sales grew because they were focused on a domestic market concerned with people’s homes. In the lockdown, this market performed well as fewer people have been commuting to work and have been spending a larger proportion… Read more

ERC’s 2020 State of Small Business Britain  is now out. And what a year it has been for the UK’s small businesses. ‘Unprecedented’ must be the defining word of 2020 and our latest report looks at how the unprecedented events of this year have translated into impacts on and actions by small and medium enterprises… Read more

Anticipating adversity, and undertaking crisis planning, are associated with increased resilience in businesses. Yet research published earlier this year by the ERC (carried out before the pandemic) found many small firms struggle to identify their most potent future threats and when crisis hits, most have no contingency plans, resorting to depleting their financial resources to… Read more

‘Furlough envy’, isolation and additional home stresses have triggered deteriorations in workplace mental health, new study suggests Workers less likely to talk to managers about experiencing mental health problems since lockdown, fearing ‘repercussions’ Study highlights need to raise awareness among employers of resources available to support mental health   Workers have become less open about… Read more

  A new report funded through the Midlands Engine Mental Health and Productivity Pilot (MHPP) finds that firms impacted by mental health sickness absence suffered a 25% hit to their productivity Bosses surveyed cited remote working and job insecurity as risk factors – but many unsure where to turn for advice on boosting staff wellbeing… Read more

Given last week’s government announcement of the stimulus bill meant to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the UK economy, it is important to recognise the implications for women broadly, and self-employed women more specifically. Such bills are notoriously gender blind, thus discounting the impact on the extent to which self-employed women are… Read more

The 2020s are already shaping up to be a decade we won’t forget and we’re barely three months in. Coming on the back of a decade when researchers and policy makers have been focused on the post-financial crisis productivity puzzle, the impact on the global economy from the Covid-19 pandemic brings new challenges and uncertainties…. Read more

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

On 5th & 6th November, the ISBE 2014 conference ” The Future of Enterprise: The Innovation Revolution” took place in Manchester.
ERC contributed to the conference through the presentation of a number of research papers, contribution to the leadership of a conference track on ‘SME growth and performance’ and leading a Masterclass on ‘Impact by Design’.

On Wednesday June 3rd we were at the University of Warwick – Warwick Business School‘s campus at The Shard for our Research Showcase. At these events we bring together colleagues, partners and stakeholders to explore our latest research insights. The presentations explored themes of entrepreneurship, innovation and business growth, highlighting the mix of current research… Read more