The role of entrepreneurship support partnerships in new venture development

The HM Government Industrial Strategy (HM Government, 2017) highlights how the productivity lag of the UK can to an extent be attributed to deficiencies in the access that young and small enterprises have to managerial training and mentoring (Bloom, Dorgan, Dowdy & Van Reenen, 2007; Bloom & Van Reenen, 2006; Office for National Statistics, 2017). The Government's Industrial Strategy proposes increased dissemination of best practice among small enterprises to offer one solution to address this training and productivity gap. During the proposed postdoctoral fellowship, I seek to respond to this call by communicating my research to a broad academic, practitioner and policymaker audience for evidence-based practice improvement.

My workplan builds on the DPhil research that I completed at the University of Oxford. This research explored how the business environment, specifically the national network of public and private sector partners promoting, co-ordinating and delivering business support, influenced the entrepreneurial practices of ventures founded by laidoff employees of a large corporation. In the remainder of the application, I will refer to the networks of public and private sector partners promoting, co-ordinating and delivering business support as entrepreneurship support partnerships.

Empirically, the research explored the development of circa 300 ventures that originated from a Nokia corporate redundancy programme in Finland between 2011 and 2014. I utilised interview and archival data to study how the ventures associated with their local entrepreneurship support partnerships and how their engagement with the partnerships subsequently influenced their development and productivity. The case of the Nokia post-redundancy ventures offered a good starting point to observe the role of business environments in shaping the development of young ventures, as the venture founders reflected highly homogeneous educational and professional backgrounds. They also all benefited from equal access to the services of the local entrepreneurship support partnerships.

The research found the entrepreneurship support partnerships to direct both the practices and the productivity of the new ventures. Unlike commonly assumed, the findings showed the entrepreneurship support partnerships not to form unitary entities but rather to split into separate clusters. The findings propose that the clusters of entrepreneurship support partnerships may reflect heterogeneous hierarchies and practices with direct influence on the practises and productivity of new ventures. Finally, the findings highlight how the entrepreneurship support partnerships, despite being designed to encourage entrepreneurial development, may, in fact, at times restrict the progress of young ventures.

The findings have implications for the policy and practice of entrepreneurship. For policymakers, the findings highlight how some aspects of entrepreneurship support partnerships may constrain venture development. For practitioners, the findings demonstrate the importance of sensitivity to the hierarchies and practices of the entrepreneurship support partnerships in order to utilise these to the ventures' full benefit. In response to the HM Government's call in its industrial strategy for improved managerial training and dissemination of best practice, the research thus offers evidence-based groundwork for increased awareness and improved skills of policymakers and practitioners.

In order to achieve increased awareness of the research and ultimate behavioural change, I have put in place a detailed impact delivery plan that engages a range of academics, policymakers and practitioners in discussion and diffusion of the research findings. The plan covers written and spoken communications in different media, training activity delivery as well as in person engagement with a Local Enterprise Partnership Growth Hub.