Another year comes to its end and it’s that time of the year when you look back at what you’ve achieved and set yourself goals for the year to come.
Here at CIMR we had a very busy end of the year, and we’d like to take you through the latest updates, key new research and events from this Autumn term as well as give you a quick glimpse of what you can expect from our community in 2023.
New CIMR members
First of all, we would like to welcome some new CIMR members: Dr Fumi Kitagawa, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the University of Edinburgh; Dr Abdulrahman Al-Surmi, Lecturer in Business Analytics at Birkbeck, University of London; and more recently Prof. Michael Mainelli, who’s Chairman, Z/Yen Group Limited, the City of London’s leading commercial think-tank and venture firm. We are grateful to see our community growing and look forward to collaborating with new members into 2023.
Latest new research activities
Our CIMR members have been very busy working on a variety of new papers and studies in diverse fields during the last term.
In the field of Entrepreneurship research, our CIMR Director Helen Lawton Smith together with Carla Susana Marques, Vitor Braga, and João J. Ferreira have published a new Special Issue in Strategic Change, Volume 31, Issue 4, which challenges stereotype images of entrepreneurs by exploring how minority groups contribute to the economic growth. Helen Lawton Smith and Dina Mansour have released a study exploring regional inequalities in innovation opportunities for ethnically diverse and disabled entrepreneurs which unveils how regional contexts have a major impact on the ability of local networks to deliver support for disabled and ethnically diverse entrepreneurs.
In terms of Innovation research, Federica Rossi has contributed to the Elgar Encyclopedia on the Economics of Knowledge and Innovation by investigating the contribution of universities to business innovation and exploring how firms source university knowledge through many different channels. Muthu De Silva, Omar Al-Tabbaa and Jonathan Pinto have explored academics engaging in knowledge transfer and co-creation; and Maryam Ghorbankhani and Federica Rossi have investigated intrinsic and strategic complementarity of research and knowledge transfer activities as determinants of knowledge transfer management.
Events, Workshops and Conferences engagement
Our CIMR Debate series of event has seen some very interesting discussion with expert academics and practitioners joining us online from around the country. We discussed creative entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial development in Liverpool City Region on the 5th October; then on the 19th October we dived into the role of co-creation and crowdsourcing instruments within Covid-19; finally on the 9th November Cecelia Rikap presented key messages from her thought-provoking and timely book co-authored with Bengt-Ake Lundvall on the ‘Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order’.
On the 16th of September we were delighted to host an online workshop welcoming academics from several universities together with representatives from Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) to discuss uses of HEBCI survey data and future development of the HEBCI. On 6th December we will be delighted to have another workshop discussing future directions for disability entrepreneurship research.
Our CIMR members have also participated as panellist on notable conferences. On 14th November Professor Helen Lawton Smith and CIMR PhD student Jacqueline Winstanley (Director of Universal Inclusion & Secretariat for All-Party Parliamentary Group for Inclusive Entrepreneurship) joined a prestigious panel of speakers at the Global Entrepreneurship Week 2022. Prof. Helen Lawton Smith also recently contributed to a roundtable discussion on “How higher education can harness and empower the UK’s research and innovation clusters”, organised by Times Higher Education and Huawei on 6th October.
Overall achievements
Finally, we are proud to mention some remarkable achievements for our CIMR community in the past term.
Our project ‘CIMR Debates in Public Policy’ was ‘Highly Commended’ in the Innovation category at Birkbeck’s Public Engagement Award 2022 held on July 12, 2022. Additionally, the paper “Female Entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia: Opportunities and Challenges” by our CIMR Director Helen Lawton Smith and Abeer Danish from the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship has been nominated as the top 5 most downloaded articles in 2022.
Looking ahead to 2023
We have a rich calendar of sessions for our Debates and Workshops in Public Policy series in 2023 with physical as well as hybrid format covering topics from innovation to entrepreneurship, digital technology and transformation.
We look forward to welcoming you in some of these discussions and finally get the chance to meet you in person.
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December 2022 – Gabriella Losito
