Female angel investors are a critical source of capital and expertise for women-led businesses, but they only represent a small proportion of the overall angel investor population.
In Gaining Altitude: Female Angel Investors Across the Regions, the latest report from our Female Founders Forum research programme, we partnered with the Invest in Women Taskforce to better understand Britain’s female angel investor community – paying particular attention to opportunities for supporting its growth.
Abundant energy supplies are essential to economic growth and if we’re to meet our climate objectives, much more clean generation capacity will need to be built in Britain. The arrival of revolutionary technologies like artificial intelligence – which promise to drive electricity demand upwards – will only exacerbate this requirement.
Small Modular Nuclear reactors, however, could be a solution to Britain’s power conundrum. In this report, our Research Director Eamonn Ives sets out the case for why SMRs can fuel economic growth and what needs to be done to speed up their delivery while bringing down costs.
Britain’s regional economic divides have long been recognised, but recent efforts to solve them have achieved little at best. In this report, we survey entrepreneurs from each region of Britain to find out what challenges they face when it comes to running and growing a business, and to gauge their expectations for the future.
While many are optimistic about what’s to come, some remain worried – and a range of obstacles to growth linger over their heads. We conclude with a range of policy recommendations to enable business owners to take their business growth to the next level.
Neurodiverse individuals are found in all parts of the economy, and the entrepreneurial community is no exception. Though awareness of neurodiversity is steadily increasing, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s properly understood.
In partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs, we surveyed neurodiverse founders to better understand various questions about being an entrepreneur with neurodiversity. We found that many neurodiverse founders think their neurodiversity gives them an advantage, and while challenges definitely exist, there’s reason to be optimistic that progress is slowly but surely being made.
Taxation in the UK is overly complex, which has a negative impact on productivity. Despite the efforts of successive governments to streamline the tax landscape, business owners still spend too long preparing and filing their taxes, or feel obliged to pay specialists to handle them instead.
In Making Tax Simple, published in partnership with Enterprise Nation and Intuit, we take a closer look at the tax system business owners face – paying particular attention to how digital tools can pay dividends for both them and the government.
As well as being a health crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic also posed immense challenges for jobs and the wider economy. One area where this has had long-lasting consequences is in terms of the number of pre-retirement age older people who fell out of the labour market and still remain economically inactive.
In Access All Areas: Older workers, the latest in our series of reports with Enterprise Nation, we examine the causes, consequences and solutions to this stubborn problem — making recommendations to government and businesses alike on how they can get more older people into work and entrepreneurship.
The effect of accumulated innovations has transformed the world at a pace that would have been unimaginable to our not-so-distant ancestors. Thanks to the contributions of just a few thousand innovators, society is now far richer, and better equipped to tackle pressing problems – from climate change or pandemics.
This new essay collection outlines some of the fundamental building blocks to achieving an innovative economy – including how to effectively fund research, how to properly regulate emerging industries, how to make it easier to start and scale businesses, and how to raise the status of innovating.
Businesses which engage in international trade are generally more productive and innovative. Yet evidence suggests Britain is not fulfilling its trade potential, and entrepreneurs tell us of barriers that prevent them from exporting.
In Access All Areas: Markets we examine the ways in which importing and exporting can help SMEs succeed, assess the recent trends in international trade, and provide a series of recommendations for what the government could do to ensure Britain’s small firms have the best conditions possible to flourish on the international stage.
There is a renewed focus to grow the economy at a faster rate. Achieving this will require many changes to be made, but returning productivity growth to historic trends will be essential. Within this puzzle, attention will need to be paid to small businesses in particular – which evidence suggests have dragged on overall productivity in recent years.
In Supporting SMEs Successfully, a new report published by the APPG for Entrepreneurship, we assess some of the current government support programmes for SMEs to boost their productivity. Our central finding is that while existing interventions are well intentioned, and in many cases working well for the businesses using them, more could still be done to ensure they are as effective as possible.
Job vacancies have spiked in the aftermath of Covid-19, and many small businesses struggle to recruit the skills they need. New technological trends, such as the advent of AI, will also disrupt the labour market, and employers and employees need to be prepared for this – so that it is an opportunity to grasp, rather than a threat to avoid.
In Access All Areas: People, we make a series of recommendations to boost the supply and quality of labour force, including reducing the cost of visas, reforming the Apprenticeship Levy, and widening the scope of tax breaks for training.
