Global Entrepreneurship Monitor United Kingdom Monitoring Report 2010

This report compares Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) measures of entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspiration in the UK with participating G7 countries. It also summarizes entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspiration across the four nations of the UK and reports on entrepreneurs’ perceptions of the effect of the global recession on their businesses, awareness in the UK of Global Entrepreneurship week, and the incidence of intrapreneurship among employees in the UK

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor United Kingdom 2011 Monitoring Report

In 2011, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research consortium measured entrepreneurial activity of individuals in 54 economies, making it the world’s most authoritative comparative study of entrepreneurial activity in the general adult population. In 2011, 10,573 adults aged 16 to 80 participated in the GEM UK survey. This monitoring report compares Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) measures of entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspirations in the UK, France, Germany and the United States, and the four home nations of the UK. It also examines the anticipated and actual challenges facing individuals starting a business in the UK. Attitudes of non-entrepreneurial individuals to entrepreneurship were more subdued than in 2010, reflecting uncertainties in the wider economy. • In the UK, 9.8% of working age adults expected to start a business within the next 3 years in 2011, compared with 15.8% in the US. Total early-stage entrepreneurial activity or TEA (the sum of the nascent entrepreneurship rate and the new business owner-manager rate - without double counting) in the UK in 2011 was 7.6%1. The rise in the UK TEA rate, while just not significantly different from the 2010 figure, appears to bring it beyond the historical trend (2002-2010) which was very stable at close to 6%. Despite the apparent rise in entrepreneurial activity in the UK since 2010, the gap with the US widened as a result of a sharp rise in the TEA rate in the US: the UK TEA rate was around twothirds (62%) of the US equivalent rate of 12.3% and above that of France (5.7%) and Germany (5.6%). When surveyed in mid-2011, 4.2% of the adult population in the UK were actively trying to start a business (nascent entrepreneurs), compared with 8.3% in the US. Nascent entrepreneurship rates in the UK, US, France and Germany rose between 2010 and 2011 – in fact, they doubled in the US. When surveyed in 2011, 3.4% of the UK working age adult population were owner-managers of a business that was 3 - 42 months old (new business ownermanagers). This is unchanged on the 2010 estimate of 3.4%, and it compares favourably with the estimate for France (1.7%) and Germany (2.4%) although it is slightly lower than the US (4.3%). In 2011, the proportion of the adult population who owned and managed a business older than 42 months (established business owner-managers) in the UK was 6.5%, similar to 2010 (6.2%). This was similar to Germany (5.6%), higher than in France (2.4%) but lower than in the US where the rate returned to pre-crisis levels at 9.1% after a dip since 2008. The estimated proportion of working age people in the UK who discontinued a business (whether through closure or sale) in the past 12 months rose slightly but not significantly to 1.6% from 1.2%, while they increased slightly to 2.9% in the US. On average, discontinuations by entrepreneurs of businesses in France and Germany were the same in 2011 as in 2010 (around 1.5%). The proportion of UK TEA entrepreneurs reporting new product/market combinations, export propensity and high or medium technology sectoral choices were just as high as in the US although fewer had high growth expectations. Necessity-driven early-stage entrepreneurship in the UK rose significantly in 2011 from 0.7% to 1.3%. In 2011, UK levels of female early-stage entrepreneurship (TEA rate of 5%) were 49% of male early-stage entrepreneurial activity – up from 44% in 2010. This is similar to France but in the US and Germany male and female TEA rates were much closer although they had widened since 2010. The sub-national distribution of TEA rates in 2011 was Scotland: 6.2%, Northern Ireland: 7.1%, England: 7.7% and Wales: 8.1%.These differences across the home nations were not statistically significant

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor : United Kingdom 2009 Monitoring Report

This monitoring report compares Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) measures of entrepreneurial attitudes and activity in the UK and participating G7 and BRIC countries. It also summarises entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspirations within Government Official Regions of the UK. It presents analysis on how the UK compares in terms of social entrepreneurial activity. It examines the views of entrepreneurs on the impact of the global recession on their own businesses. Finally, it reports expert views on the environment for entrepreneurship in the UK

Modelling the Effects of Public Support to Small Firms in the UK - Paradise Gained?

The evaluation of the impact of public policies to improve the performance of the small business sector has provoked a great deal of debate and research activity in recent years. The debate can be categorised in two broad ways. First, it can be seen in terms of the actual impact measures and schemes of small business support may have in terms of enhanced growth performance of SMEs. Second, the search for appropriate evaluation methodologies which reflect the range of problems associated with the accurate identification of the true effects of policy support. The much publicised "Six Steps to Heaven" paper by Storey (1998) provided a comprehensive overview of the problems associated with evaluation studies in the realm of the small business sector. Storey argued that the vast majority of assessments of the impact of policy support fall within the category of monitoring rather than true evaluation. The intention in this paper is to undertake an evaluation of Business Links in England adopting a methodology which seeks to avoid the methodological pitfalls articulated by Storey and in so doing achieve the approach. This paper describes the methodology employed in a tracker study of businesses that received advice and consultancy from the Business Link network in 1996. The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of Business Link support on productivity compared to a matched comparison group. Using data from the specially constructed Business Link Impact Indicators Database for the period 1994-2000 together with a survey of assisted firms and non-assisted firms, and adopting an econometric approach designed to make allowance for both 'assistance' and 'selection' effects, this study concludes that: · First, we find no evidence that in 1996 BL assistance was being targeted effectively at faster growing firms. · Second, we find some, albeit tentative evidence, that BL assistance in 1996 was having a positive effect on productivity growth. · Third, we identify a positive but statistically insignificant effect of BL assistance on turnover and employment growth. · Fourth, our analysis has highlighted a number of other factors which contribute to productivity, turnover and employment growth. The range of these factors - embracing market conditions, business strategy, the characteristics of the owner-manager and the firm itself - emphasise the complexity of the process of business growth and the consequent difficulties in both modelling and assisting the process.

Business and social entrepreneurs in the UK : gender, context and commitment

Objectives: What sort of people become social entrepreneurs, and in what way do they differ from business entrepreneurs? This question is important for policy because there has been a shift from direct to indirect delivery of many public services, requiring a professional approach to social enterprise. Yet we know little about who sets up social enterprises. Prior work: Much prior work on social entrepreneurs has been based on small and convenience samples, and this is true in the United Kingdom as elsewhere. An exception is work based on annual UK Global Entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) surveys (e.g. Levie et al., 2006). Approach: Defining and distinguishing business from social entrepreneurs is problematic. However, inclusion of items that measured the relative importance of economic, social and environmental goals in the 2009 UK GEM survey enables us to compare business and social entrepreneurs based on two different definitions: activity-based (setting up or running a new business or any kind of social, voluntary or community activity, venture or initiative) and goals-based (setting up or running a new organisation which has mainly economic goals versus mainly social goals). We use logistic multivariate regression techniques to identify differences between business and social entrepreneurs in demographic characteristics, effort, aspiration, use of resources, industry choice, location and organisational structure, identified from a representative sample of 30,000 adults interviewed in the United Kingdom in 2009. Results: The results show that the odds of an early-stage entrepreneur being a social rather than a business entrepreneur are reduced if they are male, from an ethnic minority, if they work 10 hours or more per week on the venture, and if they ever worked in their parents business, while they are increased if they have higher levels of education and if they are a settled in-migrant to their area. Implications: These results suggest that a high proportion of social enterprise founders are part-time founders. This could be a cause for concern for policy-makers keen to shift delivery of professional services from the public sector to a professional third sector. Future surveys could test if there is a hand-over of control from founders to full-time managers as social enterprises mature. Value: To our knowledge, this is the first time that large representative samples of business and social entrepreneurs have been compared using multivariate analysis. This type of research complements case-based research, enabling hypotheses raised by qualitative research to be tested on representative samples of a population

Closing the generational start-up gap

The promotion of youth entrepreneurship and self-employment has been identified as an important strand of policies to reduce youth unemployment. This report is designed to re-visit the rationale lying behind policies designed to increase youth entrepreneurship and to provide some recommendations for future action

"Developing an Evaluative Framework for Industrial Policy in Ireland: Fulfilling the Audit Trail or an Aid to Policy Development?"

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