Microbusiness Britain

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The "Micro-business Britain" project will be led by Professor Stephen Roper (ERC) and Professor Mark Hart (ERC) and managed by Katherine Hathaway. Katherine is an experience project manager and was until March 2016 a Deputy Director of ERC. Prior to working with ERC, Katherine was a Deputy Director in the Enterprise Directorate in BEIS. Central to the project will be a large-scale survey of micro-firms (covering c. 8-10k firms) which will provide place-based data to identify specific challenges these micro-businesses face in terms of growth and raising productivity. This size of sample is necessary to ensure robust comparisons between the home nations and inform both place-based policy and national initiatives around ambition, skills, innovation, internationalisation and scale-up. It would create a baseline against which future policy actions could be measured and, through data-linking, allow place-based policy impacts to be monitored and compared. Small (c. 1.5-2k) companion surveys in the US and Ireland will provide benchmark information on ambition and growth intentions (US) and supply chains and internationalisation (Ireland). The databases created will be deposited in anonymised form in the ESRC Data Archive and will, therefore, be available for use by both the research and policy communities. The focus of the project will be micro-employers (i.e. firms with 1-9 employees) which have been in business for more than three years. This will exclude the self-employed (with no employees) and also exclude start-ups with little trading history and which are liable to particularly high failure rates. Commercially available sampling frames will be used in each country permitting structured, random sampling. Telephone interviews will be conducted with a member of the leadership team of each firm. This approach has been used extensively by the team in previous studies and provides high quality information within a tight timeframe. Questionnaire design is crucial to the value of this project and we will engage with BEIS colleagues and other interested parties to identify topics and metrics to include in the survey. In addition to detailed information on the enterprise and its leadership team, key areas of focus (reflecting the main concerns of the Industrial Strategy) will be: Ambition - the strategic objectives of the firm in terms of growth, profitability, productivity etc.Resilience - attitudes and strategies for dealing with future uncertaintyMarket profile (buy side and sell side) - internationalisation, position in supply chains, public sector customers (procurement)Performance - growth, profitability, productivity (value added per employee)Innovation and diffusion - innovation activity (product/service, process), IP, links to science base, barriers Training and skills - workforce, management and leadership skillsFinance - external finance - debt, equity, alternative finance; investment profile.E-business and digital adoption - digital profile of business, ITC access and useEco-system factors - competition, infrastructure, business networks and policy supports (LEPs, Growth Hubs), other sources of adviceThere will be two deliverables from the project by end-March 2018:Survey databases (3) which are usable by other academics and policy analysts at local and national level;A draft headline report (c. 20-30 pages) "Micro-business Britain" providing an overview of key insights from the UK and international benchmark survey datasets. Publication is likely to be April 2018 given standard ERC publication protocols. Further statistical and econometric analysis will continue as part of the ERC Phase 3 research programme using the "Micro-business Britain" data and data-matching.