Presentation at the Building Better Business Resilience Literature Review Report Launch event held at the Shard. 05.0702018

1. Building Better Business Resilience:
Literature Review Report Launch
Event and Drinks Reception
Funded by
Project Collaborators:

2. Understanding resilience in
SMEs – a review of existing
research
Maria Wishart, Research Fellow,
Enterprise Research Centre and
Stephen Roper, Director,
Enterprise Research Centre

3. What is business resilience?
• A strategic objective intended to help an organisation survive and
prosper. A highly resilient organisation is more adaptive,
competitive, agile and robust than less resilient organisations and
rebounds from adversity strengthened and more resourceful
• Most research on business resilience research focuses on:
– Employees
– Business models
– Anticipating preventing and responding to shocks
• Large organisation focus, and assumption that findings are
translatable to SMEs

4. SME resilience research
Three main streams:
• SME characteristics and capabilities
– Planning abilities, resource constraints
• SME leader resilience, and the link with organisation
resilience
– Resilient leaders foster resilient SMEs
• Interventions to improve SME resilience
– Organisational development & learning programmes, team
building, developing resilient communities

5. SME resilience research – key
conclusions
• An emergent research area.
• Main focus on SME characteristics and leader resilience.
• SME capabilities characterised as detrimental to their
resilience.
• Leader seen as a resource to underpin the business’s
resilience.
• Limited research into interventions for resilience in SMEs,
more needed.
• Gaps in the research which merit further investigation:
– contextual aspects of SME that may influence their resilience,
– the connection between SME resilience and SME location.

6. Entrepreneurship among
under-represented groups
– a review of existing
research
Maria Wishart, Research Fellow,
Enterprise Research Centre and
Stephen Roper, Director,
Enterprise Research Centre

7. Under-represented entrepreneurs
• Migrants, disabled, those with low educational
attainment, ethnic minorities, women (OECD, 2017)
• Typically higher unemployment rate than for mainstream
– Migrants 8.4% higher unemployment rate than EU-born
(Eurostat, 2017), disabled 17% vs 10% for non-disabled
(European Disability Forum, 2017)
• Entrepreneurship often seen as a route into work:
– Businesses more precarious, lower turnovers and survival rates.
– More dependent & false self-employment (OECD, 2017).

8. Under-represented entrepreneurs
Common barriers
• Discrimination & stereotyping (Ram and Jones, 2008)
• Prejudice (Cooney, 2008)
• Access to finance (Ram and Jones, 2008)
• Unable to access support (Pavey, 2006)
Specific barriers
• Language (OECD, 2017)
• Unfamiliarity with culture & institutional set-up (OECD, 2017)
• Benefits trap (Kitching, 2014)
• Lack of networks (Uddin and Jamil, 2015)

9. Under-represented entrepreneurs
Enablers of entrepreneurship
• Experience of living with adversity (Cooney, 2008)
• Problem-solving and innovation skills (Drakopoulou Dodd,
2015)
• Embeddedness in social networks (Lofstrom, 2014; Ram and
Jones, 2008)
• Work ethic (Ensign and Robinson, 2011)

10. Under-represented entrepreneurs –
key conclusions
• Some common and some specific barriers
• Double and triple disadvantage not well understood
• Impact of low educational attainment under-researched
• Insufficient focus in research on interventions
• Tendency to revert to stereotypes: oversimplification
• More detailed understanding of these groups required,
to underpin more flexible and nuanced policies and
approaches

11. Roundtable discussions:
Practical implications of
the research for building
better business resilience

12. Roundtable discussions
1. What kinds of shocks do SMEs typically experience? What
does a resilient response to a shock look like?
2. What kinds of tools and interventions may support SMEs in
building resilience?
3. What skills and aptitudes might members of under-
represented groups have which may enable their
entrepreneurial ventures? How can these skills be
developed?

13. Next steps and contacts
• Research report on London survey and case study findings - 12/13th
December
• Report on European surveys and case study findings - May 2019
• Integrated final Europe-wide comparative report - November 2019
• Benchmarking tool and toolkits - November 2019
For more information contact Vicki.Belt@wbs.ac.uk
Or visit https://www.enterpriseresearch.ac.uk/sme-resilience-project-
jpmorgan/

14. Thank you