Argues that the way in which the UK Government, through its various departments and quangos, approaches designed to approve the effectiveness of the small business sector, is based on a flawed understanding of how small businesses actually operate. Argues that this naïve, over‐simplistic understanding of the motivation of those in the small business sector means that many government interventions that are made, are blunt instruments destined to fail, given the limited understanding shown of the complexity of the small business market. Presents evidence from two recent studies amongst small firms; a series of large‐scale qualitative studies undertaken for a blue chip company and a mixed study on the Business Link network. The emphasis is based on – using qualitative research – getting to grips with the emotion, ambiguity and complexity that characterises this market.

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713702518 Copyright Taylor and Francis / InformaAddressing the issue of the embeddedness of labour markets, this paper compares the processes of finding employment in the film industry within two local labour markets. Drawing on studies of freelance film crews in London (UK) and Los Angeles (US), the paper concludes that the importance of social networks in job mobility in both contexts is a consequence of common production structures. However, common labour market practice varies in each geographical space as industry processes and structures are mediated by local institutional contexts

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This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Nigel Culkin, ???Entrepreneurial universities in the region: the force awakens????, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, Vol. 22(1): 4-16, March 2016. The final, published version is available online at DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-12-2015-0310 Published by Emerald.The growth in popularity of the Regional innovation System (RIS) approach has, in part, been driven by the need for economies to respond to the after shocks of the global financial crisis. At the same time, we see the term Anchor institutions are used increasingly to describe organisations that have an important presence in the local community and make some strategic contribution to the local economy.The purpose of this paper is to consider the needs of the micro and small business ecosystem through the lens of the entrepreneurial university as a regional anchor institution.Asheim (2011) refers to regional innovation systems with an emphasis on economic and social interaction between agents, spanning the public and private sectors to engender and diffuse innovation within regions embedded in wider national and global systems. According to Doloreux and Parto (2005) three dimensions underpin the use of the RIS concept, namely: the interactions between different actors in the innovation process, the role of institutions, and the use of regional systems analysis to inform policy decisions. The author has drawn on contemporary literature on the entrepreneurial university, regional systems of innovation and institutions to explore some key qualities and problems around anchor Institutions, networks, and national and local policy. Following the Chancellor???s Comprehensive Spending Review in November 2015 and post the changes in the Department of Business Innovation and Skills remit I want to highlight the way universities can take a lead role as an anchor institution within their region. I argue that this role should include providing a wider range of formal and informal support, knowledge and resource for micro and small businesses (MSBs), alongside the usual SME suspects (Hart & Anyadike-Danes, 2014; Witty, 2013; Wilson, 2011). Based on my analysis and observing the the work of the eight Entrepreneurial Universities of the Year Award winners, during my time as President of the Institute of Small Business & Entrepreneurship (ISBE), I suggest four different ways in which collaboration might be enhanced to ensure MSBs can make maximum use of the advice and support on offer from universities playing this anchor role. The results emerging from here suggest a need for regional policy makers to embrace a innovation-supportive culture, which actually enables firms and systems to evolve over time and this would be far more effective than those proposed in the latest Comprehensive Spending Review. The outcomes of which will see some of the most robustly evaluated programmes, designed to support small firm growth, closed down to be replaced with a commitment (...