Cavendish Micro-Business Productivity Boost Project

“该试验由卡文迪什联盟（以卡文迪什企业的名称进行交易）领导，并将工作分包给我们已建立关系的四个交付合作伙伴（TEDCO, Enterprise First, Business West & Nwes）以及OMB Research。我们将与企业研究中心（ERC）合作对随机对照试验进行评估。我们的目标是确定一个具有成本效益，但提高生产力的计划，为中小企业提供商业支持，可以在全国范围内大规模运行。我们的实验解决了2016年NESTA大规模研究的一个关键发现，即经济衰退后创建的新公司拖累了整体生产率。企业内部缓慢的生产率增长是造成英国生产率难题的主要因素。我们相信Tony Danker的声明（Be The Business， 2018年6月6日）是正确的，即世界一流的领导和管理实践已被证明可以提高生产力。我们相信，如果我们能够选择合适的企业，让它们通过正确的过程，融入有效的领导和管理实践，我们将证明参与企业的生产力有明显的提高。我们相信，与传统的1:1业务支持相比，我们创新的诊断和新颖的业务支持方式将对微型企业产生更大的影响。我们将进行为期一年的随机对照试验，其中6个月的治疗时间和6个月的评估时间。对照组和实验组各有150个，将来自“启动与成长”项目现有的一批正在成长的微型企业。来自普通民众的150家微型企业将形成一个额外的对照组。“起步与成长”项目很有用，因为：1)英国初创企业面临的一个问题是，许多企业撑不过3年。我们的“创业与成长”团队是成立1-3年的企业。2)创业支持政策制定的一个挑战是收集较长时间内丰富的创业数据。我们已经有了300 S&G业务的相关数据，从而可以收集更丰富的数据。3)典型的S&G公司规模为1-9名员工。Be Business Initiative关注的是规模在10-249名员工的公司。我们坚信，关于如何提高微型企业生产率的丰富数据和见解（2017年有111万家微型企业）将对政策制定和未来英国纳税人资金的合理投资非常有用。”

"This trial is led by Cavendish Consortium (trading as Cavendish Enterprise) with work subcontracted to four delivery partners we have an established relationship with (TEDCO, Enterprise First, Business West & Nwes) and also OMB Research. We will be collaborating with The Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) for the evaluation of the Randomised Control Trial.Our goal is to identify a cost effective, yet productivity enhancing programme of business support for SMEs which can be run at scale throughout the country.Our experiment addresses a key finding from a large-scale NESTA research study in 2016, namely that new firms created after the recession have dragged overall productivity down. And that slow productivity growth within firms is the main factor responsible for the UK productivity puzzle.We believe Tony Danker's statement (Be The Business, June 6th, 2018) that world class leadership and management practices have been shown to boost productivity, to be true. We believe that if we can select the right businesses, take them through the right process of embedding effective leadership and management practices, we will demonstrate a clear improvement in the productivity of the participating firms. We believe that our innovative diagnostic and our novel approach to business support will have a significantly greater impact on micro businesses than traditional 1:1 business support.We will run a randomised control trial over one year, with six months treatment time and six months evaluation time. The control and treatment groups, each of 150, will come from an existing cohort of growing micro-businesses from the Start and Grow programme. 150 micro-businesses from the general population will form an additional control group. The Start and Grow cohort is useful because:1) A problem faced by start-ups in the UK is that many do not make it past three years. Our Start & Grow cohort are businesses aged between 1-3 years.2) A challenge in policy development for start-up support is collecting rich data on start-up businesses over a longer period of time. We already have relevant data for the 300 S&G businesse, enabling richer data collection.3) The typical S&G firm size is 1-9 employees. The Be Business Initiative is focusing on firms sized 10-249 employees. We firmly believe that rich data and insights on how to boost the productivity of micro-businesses, of which there were 1.11m in 2017, will be highly useful for policy development and future sound investment of UK taxpayers' money."