Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Current research

Research plays a key role in understanding business success, by providing individuals and teams with critical insights into how to launch a business, or make a new or existing enterprise more successful.

Academics from the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship work in collaboration with innovative organisations across a variety of industry sectors. These partnerships enable our staff and research students to gather primary data from a broad range of sources which ultimately help to and determine the questions we should ask, and ensure our research has impact in practice.

The Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is focused on understanding innovation and entrepreneurship in a variety of contexts. Our research explores how innovation may be harnessed to start, grow, and sustain organisations, and how entrepreneurial behaviour can address social problems in today's rapidly evolving world. The Institute's key areas of research include:

New venture creation and entrepreneurial behaviour

Entrepreneurial behaviour takes a range of forms, from self-employment to new venture creation. Our work adopts a variety of approaches to understand the reasons and motivations behind this:

Information asymmetry and entrepreneurial entry
Self-employment and labour markets
Habitual, serial and portfolio entrepreneurship
Macro and micro-economic approaches

Business innovation, governance and sustainability

The process of creating and managing entrepreneurial business must take innovation, governance and sustainability into account. Our research investigates this in a variety of contexts.

University spin-outs and management buy-outs
Entrepreneurship in family businesses
Open innovation in SMEs
Corporate governance and business ownership
Business model innovation
Sustainability

Digital Innovation

Digitalisation and the digital economy has opened up a wealth of topics for entrepreneurship and innovation research to explore. Our academics are specialists in some of the most cutting-edge areas of digital entrepreneurship and innovation research.

Crowdfunding and innovation
Technology and digital start-ups
Disruptive technologies
Online entrepreneurial activity
Big data and supply chain management

Social Science and Enterprise

Our social science approach to the study of entrepreneurship provides a robust philosophical and theoretical foundation for our empirical studies. As such, we offer an exciting and challenging intellectual environment for entrepreneurship and innovation studies with depth and insight.