The Entrepreneurship Research Group led by Dr Spinder Dhaliwal, Reader in Entrepreneurship at Westminster Business School(WBS) hosted an event on 11 March 2024 with Guest Speaker Professor Simon Bridge, University of Ulster. His presentation, Rethinking Enterprise: Some questions about the conventional wisdom, explored why we might expect conventional wisdom to be wrong – and the implications of that. It aims to suggest a set of assumptions which could explain the conventional wisdom about enterprise and small business and examine those assumptions including why they could have been made, evidence that they were made.
Over the last 40 years Professor Bridge has worked in the small business area as a policy implementer, a policy developer, a consultant/facilitator and an academic challenging the accepted views on enterprise and small business. Simon is a Fellow of the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship and celebrated author. His latest book, ‘The Persistence of Entrepreneurship Myths, reclaiming Entrepreneurship (Routledge 2021) was the basis for the presentation.
Dr Helen Solomon, Westminster Business School presented, Scaling up of Female Start-ups Post Covid: A Comparison of the UK and Tashkent by Dr Helen Solomon, Dr Prabha Kiran (Westminster University in Tashkent) and Dr Spinder Dhaliwal. This is a comparative study on the barriers to expansion of female start-ups following global shocks or crisis such as Covid-19, Russian-Ukraine conflict and cost of the living crisis. During the pandemic, many female business were forced scale down or pivot their business in order to keep their business going. When crisis occurs, the literature suggests that enterprises that are able to learn, experiment and innovate that are more likely to take advantages of opportunities to expand. As such female start-ups are less likely to scale up as they seek to reduce risk rather than seize opportunities. The research seeks to up open-up discussion of competing frameworks in order to helps narrow down the key barriers most likely to prevent female-owned enterprises from scaling up following crisis.
Dr Nattida Srisaracam and Dr Koko Kondo both from the Westminster Business School presented their preliminary research, Promoting inclusive business-consumer relations through ethical consumer literacy. Their research calls for an open discussion of the ethical consumer literacy topic, where educators, policymakers, and governments can support enterprises in developing more inclusive business practices within this process.