Funded Projects

Productivity – what do UK manufacturers really think?

Politicians, economists and commentators are increasingly touting a productivity problem in the UK, when compared to other economies. Perhaps counterintuitively, productivity is not a ‘hot boardroom’ topic, nor is it necessarily a key focus of management and workforce meetings in the workplace. This investigation will analyse what, if any, ‘productivity narratives’ are shaping ideas in UK manufacturers at workforce, management and boardroom levels today. The outputs will provide a novel insight into how productivity is perceived, the key influences that drive, constrain and enable productivity, and the future challenges that UK manufacturers face. This project is being undertaken in partnership with the Universities of York (Professor Peter Ball), Aston (Professor Ben Clegg) and Bristol (Professor Palie Smart). Jill and the team have been consulting and share this work widely - you can see them next at BAM 2019 and EurOMA 2019.

• Project report
• Exec Summary
• Further information on Strathclyde's project
• On the web

Raising Productivity, Housing the Economy

This study provides a new approach to both addressing how housing outcomes impact the productivity behaviours and performance of households and firms and improving the ‘housing’ dimension of regional studies of economic change. Housing has multiple characteristics including size, location, neighbourhood context and price/rent and system outcomes have implications for productivity. Recent work (Maclennan et al, 2015; 2018) indicates housing outcomes impact growth drivers: small, low quality homes impair the educational performance of children, some neighbourhood effects harm school-work transitions and constrained housing choices deepen spatial labour market mismatches. Housing prices may impact the use of capital and housing assets and neighbourhood outcomes small firm innovation possibilities. In growth localities rising housing prices/rents impact the price and availability of labour and the location choices of firms. Housing, and infrastructure, policy approaches have failed to take account of housing as essential economic infrastructure and within national and local governments policies for economic development, housing and planning have failed to grasp the growth and productivity effects of housing outcomes. The study offers a better conversation about productivity and a new narrative for housing policies.

• Project report

Returning to Work and Thriving at Work

This project explores how we can promote sustainable return to work among workers with Common Mental Disorders (CMDs) such as anxiety, depression and adjustment disorders, i.e. help workers sustain work and be productive at work after prolonged sickness absence due to CMDs. According to the OECD, 15% of the working population suffer from CMDs and 50% of workers with CMDs at some point go on long-term sickness absence. Despite remission, workers returning have poorer work functioning and are at risk of dismissals due to low productivity. Sustaining productive and high quality jobs for workers with CMDs is an overlooked problem.

• Watch the video
• Project report
• Karina's blog
• Podcast (00:11:32)

Measuring Regional Skills Mismatch

We propose a novel approach for measuring skills mismatch using a naturally occurring data on skill demands, namely online job adverts. This data offers both a very large set of specific skills as well information on where those skills are required. To arrive at a measure of skills mismatch, the skill supply in a given region will be mapped by using the UK’s Labour Force Survey (LFS). We will cross-reference occupations to a skills taxonomy, which we have developed in previous research, to determine the skills of employees in the region. We will also capture the impact of transport infrastructure on the mismatch by incorporating data on cost and duration of commute.

• Project report
• Find out more about Jyldyz's journey in data science

Exploring the relationship between non-cognitive skills and productivity

To advance understanding of the relationship between non-cognitive skills and productivity, CFE are exploring the relationship between non-cognitive skills and educational, social and economic outcomes. The work reflects on what is already known, reviewing the literature to identify relevant developments and interventions from other policy areas, and exploring the perspective of policy makers and employers through qualitative depth interviews. The work will link evidence-based theory to practice, and engage policy makers and employers with the productivity puzzle. This project aims to encourage consideration of how existing policy foci do (or could) relate to broader issues of productivity.

• Project report

Real Journey Time – Real City Size

By tracking every bus in The West Midlands for a year we have calculated how long journeys really take in the city at peak time. Using this data we are calculating the real population of the city, as defined by the number of people who could access a central event within an hour at peak time. Using the well-established relationship that, due to agglomeration benefits, larger cities are more productive we are estimating the productivity in the UK’s large cities that is sacrificed by poor transport infrastructure.

• Project report

The Divergence of Productivity and Pay?

This project will investigate a fundamental assumption about productivity – that increased productivity results in higher compensation for workers. This project will deliver UK/Scotland based empirical analysis of the links between pay, pay inequality, economic growth and productivity. It will frame this exploration within a broader interdisciplinary framework by considering the implications of the pay-productivity link for achieving inclusive growth and societal well-being. The project links directly to key gaps in theory and data evidence identified by PIN by addressing by delivering new evidence on the assumptions of a positive relationship between productivity growth and compensation and the possible ameliorating factors of globalisation, weakening trade unions, income inequality and technology.

• Project report

UK Industrial Strategy: Progressing Rural Contributions

The Industrial Strategy identifies that the UK’s productivity lags that of comparable countries, and seeks to realise improvements across all regions and types of localities, with a strong emphasis on small businesses and entrepreneurship. Evidence suggests that productivity is significantly lower outside of London and the south-east, with the Northern Powerhouse (NP) and Midlands Engine (ME) initiatives seeking to address this productivity gap. Productivity in rural areas also lags urban areas, at the UK aggregate level. These findings pose the question as to what extent are they the result of structural issues (e.g. too many firms in low productivity sectors in particular localities) or whether after controlling for sector, age and other profile variables, does the productivity of firms in the NP, ME and rural locations continue to lag the Rest of England (RoE) and urban areas. To address this, we undertake the 3 phases of research, analysing:
• Variations in small business productivity between NP, ME and RoE regions;
• Urban-rural variations in productivity;
• Determinants of variations in small business productivity.

• Project report
• Industrial Strategies and Rural Productivity (presentation)

The UK Futures Programme: a longer-term evaluation

This project seeks to advance understanding of productivity by conducting follow-up research with selected business and government co-investment projects run by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) up to 2016 to address specific productivity challenges. The projects were part of the ‘UK Futures Programme’ which trialled a series of ‘hooks’ to engage businesses in the productivity debate and test different means of tackling low productivity proposed and developed by business and intermediaries.
This longer-term evaluation with selected projects focused on engaging (mainly small) businesses in low productivity sectors/regions explores sustainability of the networks/products which the projects developed; the productivity impact on participating businesses and how this is measured; and contributors and barriers to success. It informs policy on:
• what ‘hooks’ are effective in engaging business in productivity
• what interventions enhance productivity and associated practices;
• the sustainability of different approaches; and
• ways of trialling possible improvements to workplace productivity.

• Project report

Health and Well-Being in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): A Co-Design Approach

The aim of this small research project is to co-design innovative solutions to enhance the wellbeing of the workforce in SMEs (Small to Medium Enterprises). It is well recognised that health and wellbeing in the workplace is central to the enhancement of productivity – in that a high level of health and wellbeing promotes productivity and reduces absences from work. SMEs are under-researched in relation to health and well-being and therefore little is known about how to enhance health and well-being in SMEs. The idea for the research emerged from public engagement with SMEs who have identified the need for knowledge and innovative solutions to enhance health and wellbeing in SMEs. A qualitative and co-design approach will facilitate the co-creation of practical solutions to enhancing health and wellbeing that will be tailored to SMEs and can work across the SME sector.

Performance Measurement, Productivity and Management Practices in Smaller Firms.

We examine links between measures driving management practices in smaller firms (<50 employees) and productivity. We posit that smaller firm managers use a variety of key indicators other than productivity, and that a better understanding of any connection between the two will inform analysis of the long-tail productivity problem. We use 10 interviews to collect insights into (a) if management measure performance in ways consistent with conventional definitions of productivity e.g. GVA/labour hour (b) understand the connection, if any, between the key indicators they use in their decision-making, management practices and productivity (c) whether they can impute productivity measures from their management accounts. We use the interview insights to develop a survey instrument which we pilot as part of the project with a target achieved sample of 50 manufacturing and service firms which could be used in further work to generate a wider knowledge base of these critical issues.

Talent Management in Small Advanced Manufacturers

Effectively managed organisations can achieve increased productivity with the resources already at their disposal. For talent-intensive businesses, the effective acquisition, development and retention of value-creating staff is essential to success. This project explores the realisation of productivity through effective talent management in high-value advanced-manufacturing SMEs.The project challenges the assumption that SMEs should adopt practices from large organisations. Instead, practices should be tailored to SME workplace characteristics, with the potential for sustainability and scalability. The project advances understanding of productivity in SMEs by generating valuable insights into effective leadership and talent management in SMEs to enhance productivity and business growth.

• Project report

Co-producing Insights into Small Firm Growth and Productivity Gains in Peripheral Regions

This project will tackle gaps in research by conducting primary firm-level research that advances understandings of how scale-ups finance, internationalise, use support, and learn to manage their growth. Building on our interdisciplinary research team and policy expertise, we also meet PIN objectives through an active engagement process (reports, consultations, workshops) with policy-makers and growing businesses in the four periphery areas.

SME Productivity and Mental Health & Well-being: An Empirical Enquiry - Understanding the impact of mental health on business performance in SMEs

The project will contribute to shaping the narrative of productivity debate in the following ways: (1) understanding the impact of mental health on business performance and providing evidence for business cases; (2) key influences that drive, hold back and enable the SMEs implementing management practices to improve workplace MH; (3) needs of SMEs – both in terms of capability and capacity building.

Gender pay gap disclosure and the wage setting process

To what extent does the gender pay gap influence firm productivity? Can policies designed to reduce this gap have an impact on firm performance?
This project will give three important cross-disciplinary contributions. First, it will add to the growing number of studies from the economic and management literature analysing the impact of pay transparency policies on personnel management decisions and gender pay and promotion gaps. While the authors find that this measure is effective at augmenting women’s promotion rate and narrowing gender pay differentials, it is unclear whether these results can extend to less egalitarian countries. This project will address this question by considering the UK setting and studying the impact of the 2017 pay transparency policy.

The Pay and Productivity Dilemma in the UK: a critical theoretical and empirical review

This project aims to combine 1) a critical review of the literature on the pay-productivity conundrum 2) an empirical analysis of the decoupling in the UK economy over the period 1970-2018, 3) an interdisciplinary evaluation of the findings, with a particular focus on policy orientation and labour market outcomes, and 4) a detailed case study of Scotland.

Universal Credit and In-Work Conditionality - a Productive Turn?

Universal Credit and ‘in-work conditionality’ – a productive turn? The DWP has stated that Universal Credit will help ‘business to grow’ and ‘improve productivity’ (DWP, 2018). However, the mechanisms through which this is to be achieved are unclear. Furthermore, employers have been largely absent from policy discussions. As a policy with implications for workplace social dynamics, which impact productivity (McCann, 2018), this is an important omission. This project helps to address this, asking: Will Universal Credit lead to more productive work?

• Briefing note
• Project report

Product Market Concentration and Productivity in the UK

The project uses new data from the Department of Business (BEIS) and the inter-departmental business register (IDBR) to study UK product market concentration and its relationship to labour productivity.

• Project report

Inclusive Innovation: Sustaining Productivity and Socio-Economic Inclusion Through Innovation Centres, Hubs and Districts

How are public and private sector organizations working together in innovation hubs to build inclusion in urban contexts and broader regions? The project aims at understanding how hubs can best promote inclusivity in entrepreneurship and act as formal support channels for specific groups including women and BME. The project will address the research question: how are public and private sector organisations working together in innovation hubs to build inclusion in urban contexts and broader regions?

• Project report
• Blog
• Series of Blogs

Insecure Employment and Mental Health: One Pathway in the Productivity Puzzle

By affecting employees’ mental health, insecure employment can impact on productivity. In response to the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices (2017), the Government is developing legislation to address insecure employment. This project will inform the basis for policy interventions by assessing the scope for employers to benefit from reducing insecure employment.

• Project report
• Read Daniel and Catia's blog

Mapping the Cognitive Landscape of Productivity in Northern Ireland: A Systems Approach to Understanding Productivity Policy

Like the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland has experienced weak productivity growth since the 2008 Financial Crisis despite broader economic recovery. Consequently, boosting productivity has been a central goal of contemporary economic policy even to the extent that both UK and Northern Ireland industrial strategies have been described as productivity policies. Yet evidence shows that decades of Government productivity policies have not (yet?) resulted in predictable or positive impacts on productivity performance. We argue that developing policies to effectively influence productivity outcomes requires the kind of broad and multidimensional approaches advocated by both industrial strategies. However, we suggest that an institutional bias towards thinking in terms of policy silos has prevented policy makers from identifying and acting upon opportunities for joined-up policy design and governance. Instead, we argue that the productivity puzzle may be more effectively addressed by conceptualising using a systems approach in which the economy, and policy space, is conceptualised as a system whose functioning, interactions, and interdependencies should be understood as a whole as part of the policy process. This project is an exploratory attempt to apply a systems perspective in the context of Northern Ireland productivity policy to generate a map of how policy makers perceive the economic system. Through this process, we highlight gaps, biases, and potential opportunities for developing a more refined model of the system to underpin future policy interventions.

• CECAN Webinar
• CECAN webinar slides

Financialization and Productivity

This project directly addresses the PIN priority area of ‘UK business investment (including
financialisation) behaviour’. It complements existing analyses of the role of shareholder value pressures in encouraging corporate short-termism and low investment (Stockhammer 2006; Tori & Onaran 2018), specifically that i) shareholder distributions compete with investment (Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey, 2013), ii) excessive discounting disincentivises investment (Haldane 2015), and iii) higher returns from finance lead to a switching of investment from productive to financial sources (Orhangazi, 2008).
To assess this, our project takes an interdisciplinary approach which bridges accounting and political economy to examine the accounting and law innovations used within the UK water industry before and after the financial crisis; so chosen because of its weak productivity performance post-crisis (Frontier Economics 2017; Riley et al 2018). These accounting insights may add a missing piece to the productivity puzzle: that when financial engineering proliferates, productivity declines.

• Executive Summary
• Project Report
• Supporting Data

The relationship between firm financing and investment in productivity in a very low interest rate environment

The Productivity Insights Network has identified business investment behaviour as a ‘gap’ in our understanding of what is driving, or impeding, productivity growth. This project looks directly at this issue, by considering the circumstances in which large firms elect to invest in enhancing their productive capacity (through investment in skills, equipment, processes, etc.) or instead expanding their production (generally by employing more workers, without improving productivity) – and indeed how these strategies are balanced.
The project lead, Dr Craig Berry, is a member of the Productivity Insights Network, as well as deputy director of Future Economies (at Manchester Metropolitan University), and formerly a member of the Industrial Strategy Commission (alongside Dame Kate Barker, Professor Diane Coyle, Professor Richard Jones and Professor Andy Westwood) and deputy director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (University of Sheffield). He has also worked in public policy, including for HM Treasury and the Trades Union Congress.

Sustainable and Productive?! Helping Manufacturing SMEs to Manage Multiple Goals

Increasing productivity is one of the most important goals for organisations but it is not the only goal. The UK must also achieve zero net emissions by 2050. Yet, research focuses on productivity in isolation from environmental sustainability In this project, we recognize that sustainability and productivity are not independent with obvious (e.g., reducing waste) and less obvious (e.g., sales travel, well-being) interdependencies
These knock-on effects are particularly difficult for manufacturing small and medium enterprises (mSMEs) which do not have spare resource, are carbon “heavy” and where productivity has stalled. Goal conflicts are also likely to occur in regions with lower innovation and poorer infrastructure
We show how multiple goals frameworks can be used to understand and improve organizational decision-making so mSMEs can thrive beyond 2050. We have built a team comprising expertise across psychology, sociotechnical systems, environmental sustainability and engineering and have designed the research to ensure co-creation with mSMEs themselves.

Using Shocks to Construct New Perspectives on Productivity: Designing Systems Dynamic Model(s) of Productivity in Northern Ireland

This project proposes to build on research previously funded by PIN, which applied systems approaches to analysing productivity policy narratives in Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit. This research will serve to deepen PIN’s relationship with a key regional stakeholder, the Northern Ireland Department for the Economy, and pioneer new approaches to modelling long-term productivity patterns in a case study region. Specifically, it asks: What effect do mounting economic uncertainties and risks have on productivity both in anticipation of the shock of Brexit and after? What can productivity trends in the wake of other historic economic shocks teach us about what to expect as the UK reorients itself in the global market in a post-Brexit world? In other words, how does Brexit intersect with long-term economic trends and tendencies, in particular in the realm of productivity growth?
It will employ a complex systems approach to create a broad database of productivity measures and to design systems dynamics models of productivity patterns and use the Brexit event horizon as a natural experiment to test hypotheses about the productivity puzzle and produce foresight about potential impacts.

Rethinking Capital Allocation in a Context of Financialization: Producing and Index of High Productivity/Low Financial Engineering Firms for Investors

This project addresses an under-explored factor in the UK’s productivity puzzle: that if managers are able to make high shareholder distributions over the short term from financial engineering (i.e. the use of creative accounting practices and innovations in legal structure), they may be less inclined to pursue productive investments as a means of generating shareholder returns, with negative effects on productivity. However, the high short-term shareholder returns made possible by financial engineering may position firms favourably in capital markets relative to those firms with a longer-term horizon. Financial engineering, in other words, may ‘crowd out’ investment-led productivity opportunities and lead to a misallocation of capital.
This project will:
- examine the use of financial engineering to pay high dividends and productivity performance in three companies in each of five UK sectors (banking, retail, construction, extraction and business support services).
- examine their access to, and use of, capital in those company cases to assess the ‘crowding out’ effect.
- develop a scoring mechanism which would allow us to rank firms according to low-financial engineering/high-investment/high-productivity features to produce an index for use in the investment community, to help attract capital to those firms.

Drivers and productivity Impacts on Underemployment - Insights on labour Market Effects and Employers' Decision-Making in Contrasting Local Labour Markets

This project aims to: (a) explore spatial patterns in short-hours working and underemployment and identify associated local labour market conditions using LFS data; (b) conduct qualitative research with employers to understand better the drivers of underemployment and views of its impact on productivity; and (c) draw on these mixed-methods analyses, along with engagement with policy stakeholders and academic experts, to arrive at policy prescriptions on reducing underemployment and enhancing productivity and skills formation. We use the LFS definition of underemployment as “those people in employment who are willing to work more hours, either by working in an additional job, by working more hours in their current job, or by switching to a replacement job…’’ (full definition: https://www.ons.gov.uk). The consistently high level of employment alongside low growth during the UK’s slow recovery from the Great Recession is seen as contributing to weak labour productivity. However, counter-intuitively, some argue that underemployment is both an important cause and consequence of the productivity puzzle in the UK’s disadvantaged labour markets.
This research, therefore, engages with PIN’s priorities on work & the workplace, especially the relationship between job quality and productivity, and factors impacting job quality (e.g. sector and employee voice, but adding value by exploring spatial/labour market dynamics and employer decision-making). The focus on employers’ behaviour and sectoral and spatial/labour market factors influencing underemployment also links to PIN work on well-being & inclusive growth and our engagement with policy stakeholders (to inform policy) connects with the theme on regional & city productivity debates.

Redefining SME Productivity Measurement and Assessment for a Low Carbon Economy

The UK faces the twin challenges of low productivity growth and the threat of climate change.
Public policy is searching for interventions to address these, with much emphasis on improving access to finance for innovative SMEs. This study identifies ways for improving measurement of productivity amongst SMEs, drawing on the experience of SMEs and impact investors working in the low carbon economy. This requires new consideration for how productivity and economic growth is measured, to account for environmental outcomes.
There are particular challenges in this sector as low carbon innovation is often long-horizon, making financing problematic, with lagged standard GVA productivity per employee outcomes. There is urgent need for a study which can redefine productivity measurement, explore how productivity should be assessed within the context of the emerging low carbon economy and inform policy focus on SMEs generating a sustainable green economy.
The study is multi-disciplinary, combining expertise in policy evaluation, productivity,
entrepreneurial and behavioural finance, and low carbon innovation. The project will review the literature on productivity and the impact of low carbon investment, explore the metrics and indicators used by those investors and SMEs trying to value the environmental, social and economic value of their investments, review the existing SME data sets to identify areas for improvements, and conduct workshops to provide deep insights to deliver policy and practice impacts.

Access to finance and productivity enhancing investments in the UK: does the source of finance matter?

In line with the aim of the PIN, the intention of this project is to explore new directions in
productivity research to contribute to unlock the UK productivity puzzle. We build on some of the PIN’ Gap Analysis, which have highlighted the importance of financial factors as a “potential (major) source” behind the UK productivity puzzle (i.e. Harris, 2019).
The notion behind this explanation is that barriers to access finance disrupt the efficient allocation of resources and the financing of productivity-enhancing investments.
This project proposes a new direction to this line of research by exploring the importance of diverse sources of finance for firms’ productivity-enhancing investments across different regions in the UK.
Whilst prior studies have examined the relationship between access to finance (in general) and firms’ productivity, surprisingly little is known about the importance of diverse sources of finance, and their regional variation, for diverse firm-level productivity investments.
The capital structure literature mainly distinguishes between debt and equity, however,
heterogeneity in these sources of finance have been rarely investigated. Yet, the interdisciplinary financialization literature argues that finance from different types of shareholders (i.e. equity finance from families, pension funds, hedge funds, mutual funds etc.) have different implications for firm’s investment decisions (e.g. Bushee, 1998, and Brossard et al. 2013).
This project will investigate explicitly the type of debt and equity finance, as well as alternative funding sources, used by UK firms across different regions to support their productivity-enhancing activities.

Relating Productivity to Organisational Context: Meaning, Measures, and Maximising Through Workforce Engagement

The government’s most recent Business Productivity Review (November 2019) calls for a new Business Change Cycle; business support to help identify solutions, with new services and products to deliver the desired change, and strong leadership to embed the change in the business. The report evidenced that a root cause is the disconnect between policy-makers, their performance statistics, and the business view (or dismissal!) of the importance, meaning and metrics of productivity (e.g. Work Foundation Manufacturing in the UK 2016, Green & Stanfield PIN Project Report 2019, ERC Understanding Value Added per Employee in Six UK Sectors, 2019).
In a 2016 UKCES-funded applied research project (SQW for UKCES, Evaluation of the UK Futures Programme: The Jaguar Land Rover High Performance Working Practices Programme, 2016) developed and tested a fully-customised process to introduce High Performance Working principles and practice. The outcomes were more productive environments, created through employer-led enhancement of employee engagement and discretionary contribution, with demonstrable business benefits. The many findings included the signal benefit of the employer-led methodology, from the initial self-assessment through the consequent improvement projects design and delivery to the closing evaluation.
This project will now strengthen the link between the HPW processes and the productivity agenda. It will derive and test a framework and methodology for a company to (1) articulate its own take on productivity to align with its business environment, operations and plans, (2) specify appropriate success factors, measures and targets, and (3) propose mechanisms to link these parameters with value-added criteria.

A Microscale Approach to Understanding Spatial Productivity Patterns in the UK

This project will create a powerful quantitative resource and conduct analysis that can be used by network researchers to interrogate the interrelationship between productivity, land use and infrastructure provision. This strengthens PIN’s core objectives of developing place and sector-based insights, by challenging more conventional siloed interpretations and explanations of the productivity puzzle. While data is available at low levels of spatial disaggregation; until now researchers have been unable to directly link this to productivity outcomes as estimates of workplace productivity are not available on a similar scale. Being able to do this will advance our understanding of productivity by providing a much finer-grained analysis of the relationship between productivity, land-use, infrastructure provision and a wide range of other economic variables.
Our analysis will focus on the following questions:
1. What new insights can we gain about spatial productivity by exploring patterns at more granular scales?
2. What is the significance of the spatial distribution of high productivity LSOAs? What is the link between land use profiles and productivity?

How Can Enterprise Ecosystems Enhance SME Capability to Tender for Public Sector Contracts?

The effective exclusion of most SMEs from public sector supply chains, or their positioning at lowest end of value chains, impedes productivity by: 1. undermining SME growth and local economic development; 2. inhibiting innovation and competitiveness in public supply chains; 3. wasting scarce SME resource in unsuccessful tendering.
The draft UK Industrial Strategy (IS) included a chapter highlighting this problem and a pledge to award SMEs 33% of public spending by 2022 (UK Government, 2017); this was cut in the final IS, perhaps because of uncertainty about how to tackle market failure. Until recently, research on the SME tendering problem has been scant, focused on SME resource scarcity or offered partial models of capability. Turner and Rouse (2018) and Turner (2017), drew on comparative case studies to detail how competitive tendering is a knowledge-intensive process of developing a complex set of routines that combine in various patterns to build operational capabilities, then enabled/renewed by dynamic capabilities, Encouragement from procurers, SMEs and business supporters that our model provides important insight into how SMEs learn to tender led us to found Centre for Tendering.
This project proposes to explore:
1. How enterprise ecosystems can support SMEs to learn tendering capability.
2. What change to enterprise ecosystems is likely to enhance SME learning to be capable
tenderers.

Quantifying Agglomeration Productivity Potential in Long-Term Infrastructure Planning

This project focuses on aspects relating to the interrelation of the effects of urban connectivity, agglomeration, and morphology (e.g. land-use, housing, etc.) on efforts seeking to ‘rebalance’ urban and regional output in a UK context.
Current understanding of and approaches to devising and selecting infrastructural and
ultimately land-use interventions for better urban economic performance are of limited capacity in providing long-term ‘place-based’ blueprints. These have been best framed by Sir David Higgins, the former Chair of HS2 Limited, as a need for an overall national transport strategy for and against which individual interventions can be constructed and appraised.
These issues are echoed in PIN’s Infrastructure and Regional and City Productivity Debates evidence reviews. PIN’s evidence reviews have specifically highlighted a number of gaps in our understanding and framing of the wider effects and role of infrastructure, particularly that of mobility and transport, on the productivity prospects of the UK cities. Difficulties in directly determining and measuring precise improvements in overall GVA as a result of particular transport infrastructure interventions and a lack of mechanisms/tools that would enable a more longer-term oriented planning of infrastructure targets have specifically been highlighted in these evidence reviews.
Here, we seek to advance understanding of productivity premiums that may be associated with the spatial organization and connectivity of small-area land-use and demographic profiles within cities. Using the Sheffield Travel-to-Work Area as a testbed, this project will examine ways to quantify agglomeration productivity potential in long-term planning for land-use and transport infrastructure.

Can Fintech coordinate and support physical consumption in a COVID-19 economy

An exit from lockdown allows us to consider what socially distant physical economic activity will look like. The retail and hospitality sectors will be crucial to recovery, however these traditional cash heavy sectors have key barriers to operation arising from the need to socially distance. In particular their physical premises and reliance on cash. Various policy reports are explaining the benefits of going cashless for these businesses. This research will investigate the cashlessness journey for businesses in the hospitality sector and examine the role of cashless payment systems for coordinating physical economic activity allowing for socially distant use of premises.
This rapid move toward cashlessness is an acceleration of an ongoing trend. The proposed benefit of ‘going cashless’ for the firms include far easier banking, less risk of crime and anti-social behaviour, easier accounting and audit trails, advantages for supply chains and real-time decision making, reductions in staffing costs and hours associated with ‘cashing up’ and depositing takings, the requirement for less senior staff to money monitor and less training.
The proposed benefits to the consumer, centre around convenience, safety and security as well as a variety of linked in budgeting tools and spending controls.
In light of COVID-19 we can add to these, benefits around social distancing for staff and customers with the traditional benefits of cashlessness including, for example, no change requirements, speedier point of sales, no bank trips etc. However the coordination of physical activity, including for example, remote ordering, self payment and remote direction and instruction could also facilitate socially distant economic consumption.
This research will investigate:
1. Cashlessness as a facilitator of social distant economic activity.
2. New Business Models in hospitality arising from COVID-19.
However, whilst we can see that these benefits could increase short term productivity through reduction of hours per business output unit, there are three longer term issues the proposed project will investigate:

1. The benefits of cashlessness in hospitality may fail to materialise for organisations servicing gig and entertainment locations.
2. The introduction of cashlessness in a retail organisation may remove routes for promotion from the ‘shop floor’.
3. The behavioural effects of cashlessness may encourage spending and potentially debt accumulation.

Additionally, the project will investigate if the business decision to ‘go cashless’ is taken alone or in the context of a reduction of bank cash services. This will help to understand if the decision is business-driven or a response to the changing environment. The idea of cashless business in the traditional cash-heavy areas provides an interesting and unexplored area for productivity research. The increasing pace of implementation in the proposed project’s target areas of hospitality and retail provides an insight into the technological attempts to increase productivity in the so-called low productivity areas.