Micro-business Britain
‘Digital dividend’ productivity boost for UK’s micro firms • Biggest ever study of UK ‘micro-businesses’ (with 1-9 employees) shows big boosts to productivity from use of digital technologies • Doubling adoption could provide a ‘digital dividend’ boost to the economy worth £16.6bn • Research points way to boosting output of group of firms traditionally seen as ‘drag’ on… Read more
ERC Research Showcase
The latest ERC Research Showcase event took place on 20th January at WBS at The Shard in London. As usual we had a busy and varied agenda, with the ERC team reporting on a selection of the research projects being undertaken at the Centre. In the morning we covered a range of topics including: The links… Read more
The Mittelstand v Silicon Valley: Which model of entrepreneurship is most relevant for post-Brexit Britain?
Growth in the UK is slowing down as business investment declines amid Brexit uncertainty. Jobs growth too seems to be slowing particularly in scaling firms. As always, however, the UK’s entrepreneurial small-and-medium firms (SMEs) will play a key role in restoring future growth. But how should we ‘do’ entrepreneurship in the future? A recent research… Read more
Talking trademarks
We are all familiar with trademarks from “Google” to ‘McDonald’s”. But who are the UK’s most active trademarkers? And, how is the profile of trademarking changing in the UK? Some data recently published by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) on domestic trademark applications in the UK suggests some of the answers. Before looking at the… Read more
Thought Experiment seminar
ERC Directors Mark Hart and Stephen Roper were guest speakers of the Open Innovation Team in the Cabinet Office on Thursday 15th February to kick off their Spring ‘Thought Experiment’ seminar series. They discussed SME growth and productivity and presented new data and ideas on business support and innovation to officials from Cabinet Office, HMT… Read more
Team size, diversity and performance of new ventures and SMEs : a meta-analysis.
Published: 15 February 2018
ERC Research Paper No 64
RENT XXXI 2017
RENT XXXI Research in Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Lund, Sweden, November 15th -17th. ERC Research Fellow Areti Gkypali will present Home Alone: Innovation and sales growth intentions among the sole self-employed. Abstract:It is widely known that solo self-employed entrepreneurs enjoy non-pecuniary benefits from their employment status and earn less compared to those employed. They have greater… Read more
ERC Response to ‘Building our industrial strategy: green paper, January 2017’
The ERC welcomes the opportunity to input to the consultation relating to the Industrial Strategy and our response draws on our own research and data analysis and related academic studies. We focus on those areas in which we as a Centre have specific expertise. Our hope is that the evidence we cite is useful in… Read more
Bo (Grace ) Peng
Research Fellow
(Seeking, Acting on and Appreciating) the Value of Business Advice.
Published: 24 May 2016
Previous evidence shows that business advice helps businesses and that more advice is generally better [1-4]. Most firms will take advice from outsiders at some point in their development but fewer firms take advice than seems warranted by the evidence [5]. The reasons for the reluctance to take advice are varied and have been relatively intractable; moreover our understanding of the ‘subtle processes’ within advice has been hampered by the few inductive investigations [6] with recent exceptions [7-9]. These ‘subtle processes’ imply that advice is not a single process but is made up of a series of sub-processes.
