Number of new firms being started falls by 13% across the UK – with much sharper declines in many parts of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland Firms achieving sustained rapid growth and productivity gains remain a small minority ‘Warning signs’ highlight dangers for job creation from ongoing uncertainty around Brexit The number of new start-ups in the UK… Read more

A new ERC report published today has highlighted an enterprise divide among Northern Powerhouse regions across a range of growth metrics. An ‘East/West divide’ has opened up when it comes to business start-ups and firm growth in the Northern Powerhouse area, new research has found. The  Northern Powerhouse Growth Dashboard found that in the most… Read more

Express and Star (West Midlands) Number of business start-ups in the region slump Northern Echo Brexit uncertainty to blame for slowdown in new firm creation Financial Times Start-ups are scaling up despite Brexit jitters Business Matters Start-ups slump as entrepreneurs wait for Brexit certainty Financial Times Brexit blamed for sharp fall in number of new… Read more

The Aston Angle 01/04/2019 Does firm-level jobs data show a ‘canary in the mine’ for the UK economy?  Irish times 03/04/2019 Majority of small businesses not interested in scaling  The Independent 03/04/2019 Big ideas: Small Irish businesses more innovative than UK and US counterparts Irish Examiner 03/04/2019 Small business ‘content with size’ Irish Examiner 03/04/2019… Read more

The ERC published a new research paper today on job creation and destruction in the UK economy, based on new analysis of ONS data. The analysis, by Mark Hart and Neha Prashar, shows that established firms are already shedding jobs, and although employment is being buoyed by start-ups, these are prone to high failure rates…. Read more

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

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

Mark Hart and the ERC team were pleased to be involved in producing a large part of the statistical evidence as well as showing the connection between design & innovation – an established driver of productivity for the new Design Council report on the design economy launched by Greg Clark MP (Secretary of State for BEIS)… Read more

Building better business health: what can we learn from public health campaigns? The continuing productivity gap between the UK and its international competitors has focussed attention on the competitiveness of UK firms. So how can we boost the health and vitality of UK businesses? Or, more accurately, how can we encourage businesses themselves to take… Read more

The latest Insight paper from the ERC is published today. Authored by ERC Director ,Stephen Roper. Recent trends in the digital creative sector in Coventry and Warwickshire. The digital creative sector plays a key role both a provider of jobs in its own right and also as an enabler of digital innovation in other sectors. In… Read more