In 2016, the ISBE board of trustees set about discussing and agreeing the Institute’s role and remit, and priorities for the years through to 2020. With the support of BIG Associates Ltd, we considered the Institute’s past endeavours to support small business and entrepreneurship, reflecting on which areas would most benefit our membership and wider network over the coming years.

As part of this work through into 2017, and with regular reviews on progress afterwards, the following are now agreed:

Purpose, Values & Vision

Our purpose: “to enable excellence in small business and entrepreneurship across research, policy, practice and learning communities”.

Our values are CLEAR: Community, Looking forward, Ethical, Authoritative, and Relevant.

Our vision: “to connect our membership and their communities to pursue excellence in small business and entrepreneurship”.

We agreed to focus our activities on the following areas to best develop the Institute’s future for our membership. All our current activities fall under these areas.

Our Strategic Priorities and Outcomes

Strategic Priorities

1. An engaged membership through understanding our clients (segmentation, career transitions) and defining our value propositions and how to “package” that to members.
2. An unmissable and quality conference.
3. To develop and grow the Institute’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Communities of Interest (CoIs)
4. To develop a sustainable business model with good governance and resource planning.

In addition to the strategic priorities the following cross-cutting themes will be supported:
• developing the right partnership relationships
• creating outputs for policy and practice
• developing support programmes (e.g. RAKE, Fellows).

Strategic Outcomes

By the start of 2020, we will have:
1. Built and effectively communicated a custom set of packages to our primary and secondary customer segments that retain existing and attract new members.
2. A dynamic and innovative governance system that reflects our position as a leading network supporting small business and entrepreneurship.
3. A distinctive and leading edge conference that fosters world class dialogue supporting small businesses and entrepreneurship.
4. An active, sustainable and strategically integrated programme of CoIs/SIGs.