Intersections of gender, ethnicity, place and innovation : mapping the diversity of women–led SMEs in the UK

This article advances knowledge on the diversity and heterogeneity of women-led small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United Kingdom by analysing how gender intersects with ethnicity and place to influence their engagement in innovation. We adopt an intersectional perspective, and base our analyses on the Longitudinal Small Business Survey (LSBS) data of 29,257 SMEs over the period 2015–2018. Our findings suggest that despite their limited number, as well as firm size and industry sector constraints, women-led SMEs are actively engaged in innovation activities. In addition, our results on the effects of intersecting categories of gender, ethnicity and place on innovation, further emphasise the heterogeneity of women-led SMEs, both with regard to their likelihood to engage in innovation, as well as the place where innovation is most likely to occur. Implications for policy and practice are highlighted

Absent or overlooked? Promoting diversity among entrepreneurs with public support needs

Despite the widely recognized importance of diversity for business performance, knowledge concerning the support needs of under-represented groups is still limited. We adopt an intersectional approach to analyse the challenges and support needs of ethnic minority entrepreneurs and those with disabilities to participate in entrepreneurial activity in the UK. Our qualitative data is based on focus groups and semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that engagement in entrepreneurship is influenced not just by minority status, but by the specific relations to other socio-demographic categories within which that status is embedded. Intersectional counter-frames form part of the strategies utilized by individuals to gain access to otherwise limited resources. We develop a conceptual model for promoting greater equality, diversity and inclusion within an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and recommend a more holistic approach to realizing inclusive economic growth. This includes adopting a hybrid/blended approach that combines targeted programmes with the development of mainstream support programmes

Hidden clusters: the articulation of agglomeration in City Regions

For many years, local economic development has been driven by the desire to maintain, attract and nurture clusters of economic activity in targeted industrial sectors. However, where clusters are not conventionally sector-based, public policy needs to develop alternative approaches to leverage the economic benefits and realise competitive advantage. Drawing on a study of the Sheffield City Region (SCR), the paper explores the challenge of leveraging ‘hidden’ cross-sectoral clusters, which do not fit dominant discourses of agglomeration-led growth. We posit that it is the cross-sectoral connections and networks in the SCR which represent its key strength, yet these are only partially reflected by current place marketing and policy considerations, and, in many ways, are overlooked and thus remain ‘hidden’. The paper argues that the competitive advantage of the SCR is undermined when it characterises clusters in terms of industrial sectors, and instead needs to articulate its strengths as a strategically important industrial centre. The paper concludes by drawing out a number of implications for academic theory and policy development

Third mission and regional context: assessing universities’ entrepreneurial architecture in rural regions

Universities are expected to contribute to regional development through the ‘third mission’ going beyond traditional academic core functions. Hitherto, the literature has focused on a rather idealistic ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to university engagement, though in reality universities have different ways to carry out third-stream activities. This has been partly explained by geographical factors. Therefore, this paper focuses on how a particular context – in this case a rural region – can shape universities’ institutional responses towards the third mission. A single case study of the University of Lincoln (UK) demonstrates that a rural context has an impact on the way universities develop their entrepreneurial architectures. A contextual element, namely a rural region, was added to the entrepreneurial architecture framework, originally conceptualized by Vorley and Nelles in 2009 to study how the rural context affects the other dimensions of the entrepreneurial architectures framework. Tentative findings from the case study suggest that in rural regions universities face increased expectations to take leadership outside academia in the lack of other local knowledge institutions. The engagement is largely based on personal linkages with external stakeholders instead of a formal collaboration mechanism, while the structures and strategic choices are oriented towards serving the local job market and regional priority sectors. These results imply that a particular context shapes the university’s orientation and institutional responses to third-stream activities, and thus further context-sensitive studies on universities’ entrepreneurial architectures would be beneficial for exploring how universities can efficiently contribute to regional development in different environments. can efficiently contribute to regional development in different environments

Social learning in LEADER: Exogenous, endogenous and hybrid evaluation in rural development

This paper considers the relationship between the centralised exogenous, institutions and the embedded, endogenous institutions of rural governance in Europe through an examination the evaluation procedures of the European LEADER programme. LEADER is presented in the literature as progressive in terms of innovation and stakeholder engagement. Yet while the planning and management of LEADER embraces heterogeneity and participation, programmatic evaluation is centralised and held at arms length from delivery organisations. The paper reviews previous efforts to improve evaluation in LEADER and considers alternative strategies for evaluation, contrasting LEADER practice with participatory evaluation methodologies in the wider international context. Can evaluation in itself be valuable as a mode of social learning and hence a driver for endogenous development in rural communities in Europe? The paper concludes by examining the challenges in producing a hybrid form of evaluation which accommodates endogenous and exogenous values

The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Education: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Using a teaching model framework, we systematically review empirical evidence on the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) in higher education on a range of entrepreneurial outcomes, analyzing 159 published articles from 2004 to 2016. The teaching model framework allows us for the first time to start rigorously examining relationships between pedagogical methods and specific outcomes. Reconfirming past reviews and meta-analyses, we find that EE impact research still predominantly focuses on short-term and subjective outcome measures and tends to severely underdescribe the actual pedagogies being tested. Moreover, we use our review to provide an up-to-date and empirically rooted call for less obvious, yet greatly promising, new or underemphasized directions for future research on the impact of university-based entrepreneurship education. This includes, for example, the use of novel impact indicators related to emotion and mind-set, focus on the impact indicators related to the intention-to-behavior transition, and exploring the reasons for some contradictory findings in impact studies including person-, context-, and pedagogical model-specific moderator