Research focus

Research Focus at the Bettany Centre for Entrepreneurship

The Bettany Centre works with entrepreneurs along the entire entrepreneurial life-cycle, linking our research, education and practice. The Centre's research areas are broad, reflecting individual scholarly interest and adding value to the cumulative knowledge in entrepreneurship. These include:

• Entrepreneurial mind sets and behaviours
• Entrepreneurial finance and de-risking ventures
• Commercialisation of science and technology
• Family business growth and succession
• Social impact and social entrepreneurship/sustainability
• Entrepreneurship in larger organisations
• Entrepreneurial leadership/teams

This list is by no means exhaustive. However, we have a preference for research which is empirical in orientation and supported by robust analysis, whether this is quantitative or qualitative (using case-based methods). We seek to develop insights that can be published in high impact journals, provide thoughtful content for practitioners and enable our teaching and materials to remain at the forefront of the field.

Research Projects

Our current research projects include the following:

KEEN (www.keennetwork.com)

The “Knowledge-Empowered Entrepreneurship Network” was developed to position Kaunas University of Technology at the forefront of EU research in entrepreneurship. The overall objective of the KEEN project is to strengthen the research excellence of Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania) in entrepreneurship, improve its capacities to exploit and disseminate its research outputs, and enhance its ability to engage the public in its research and entrepreneurship awareness, understanding, and acceptance.

Four European Universities are involved in reaching objectives of KEEN project:

• Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania)
• Cranfield University (United Kingdom)
• Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Germany) 
• Universität St. Gallen (Switzerland)

Lived Life of the Entrepreneur (LLEnt)

With Dr Imran Zawwar. Collaborators include: Aman Centre for Entrepreneurial Development at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan; Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan; Economic Reforms Committee, Government of Pakistan; HATLAB, the Hub of all Things (www.hubofallthings.com)

Fundamentally, entrepreneurship is what entrepreneurs do over time: an essential component of teaching for rather than about entrepreneurship is communicating that experience. However, our teaching is constrained by an evidence base characterised by cross-sectional, as opposed to longitudinal, methods and knowledge. We aim to address these limitations by developing the Lived-Life of Entrepreneurship. Specifically, we draw on entrepreneurs’ longitudinal, personal digital data to map the entrepreneurial experience in and over real-time. We enhance the enterprise curriculum through presentation of a dynamic benchmark of contemporary entrepreneurial behaviour and practice underpinning an individual-level entrepreneurial-orientation diagnostic designed to enable targeted intervention/support for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Current Grants/Funding Partner

QTEC: Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (www.bristol.ac.uk/qtec)

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Business models for the Nano Membrane Toilet (www.nanomembranetoilet.org)

Software Sustainability Institute: Computationally-supported approaches to content analysis in systematic review (www.software.ac.uk/about/fellows/richard-adams)

British Academy / Leverhulme: Blockchain for Good - (b4g.strikingly.com)