Professor Mark Hart is Professor of Small Business and Entrepreneurship at Aston Business School, Associate Director of the Aston Centre for Growth, and is one of the Programme Directors and Academic Lead of the national Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme. A 2014 recipient of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion, he has played a national role in promoting enterprise skills and supporting entrepreneurs as well as advising government on small business and entrepreneurship matters. He is Deputy Director of the national Enterprise Research Centre (www.enterpriseresearch.ac.uk) which is jointly hosted by Aston University and the University of Warwick and has as its mission to understand the drivers of small business growth. Mark leads on business growth and productivity research to understand the dynamics of the private sector over time and the role of SMEs as well as contributing to the work on growth ambition and access to finance. He also manages the GEM UK national team for GEM Global which is the only international source of annual evidence on entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspiration (www.gemconsortium.org). Mark was appointed in 2021 by the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak to the Expert Advisory Council for the Government’s Help to Grow Management programme for SMEs across the UK.
