Small businesses have always been an important part of economic life but it is only since the 1980s that special attention has been paid to them. It was at the end of the 1970s, at a time of high unemployment, that David Birch, a researcher in the USA, highlighted their contribution to job creation. Before that big businesses were thought to the source of most new jobs and so governments became interested instead in small businesses. Consequently, at least in the UK, the 1980s were referred to as the enterprise decade when budgets were available to support small businesses and academics devoted effort to researching and exploring their make-up and potential, writes Professor Simon Bridge.
One outcome from this interest is the organisation now called the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) which held its 46th annual conference this November. It was originally launched as a forum for both academics and policy makers interested in exchanging information about this area of endeavour. Indeed, after 1985 when the conference was first held in Northern Ireland, there was a regular attendance by people from our enterprise development bodies including the then Department of Economic Development and LEDU, the NI small business agency before Invest NI was formed. But that official interest seems to have waned and a noticeable feature of the conferences in recent years is that there has not been an DfE or Invest NI presence.
This could be because ISBE doesn’t provide off-the-shelf, ready to implement solutions. Some years ago I remember a departmental attendee complaining that the conference had not told her what to do – but that is not a reasonable expectation. It cannot provide the equivalent of oven-ready meals but it does offer access to the ingredients from which you might be able to prepare meals to suit your taste – or, in the enterprise policy case, the ideas you need to help you develop better approaches to your particular problems.
Our knowledge about most subjects is not static but evolves as our understanding develops – and this is especially so in the case of a recently explored field of study. That is why knowledge in a subject has been said to have a half-life: the period of time over which half the current ‘knowledge’ will cease to be useful. Even a key piece of thinking like Newton’s law of gravity, which for a long time was thought to be a brilliant and enlightening explanation of a previously strange set of phenomena, has been overtaken as Einstein’s theories have been found to be more accurate. Therefore our thinking continually needs to be tested to see if it is still the best available because, as Sir Karl Popper pointed out, if not checked erroneous beliefs can have an astonishing power to survive.
The ISBE conference offers a convenient forum in which access new ideas because it provides an opportunity to meet many people researching in this area. Attendees can hear presentations of the current research and ask questions about it. They can listen to and discuss with some of the leading teachers and researchers – and thus they can explore the latest thinking. For example this year there was a team from the UK’s Enterprise Research Centre who between them presented nine papers, four of which were nominated for best paper prizes, and two of these received awards.
If you are an enterprise agency, how do you get an input from different thinking – especially when current start-up policy hasn’t worked? It is clear that a key input to innovation is fresh ideas from those with different experiences or perspectives. Therefore, if Invest NI is itself to be innovative, as it encourages others to do, how is it going to see the opportunities for improvement if it does not engage with those still exploring this area and who consequently have potentially different insights? Or does Invest NI think it has access to all it needs to know about enterprise and small businesses and doesn’t feel any need to update its thinking – a bit like the medical practitioners who dismissed ideas about the benefits of cleanliness in surgical practice as having no logical basis?
