Mark Freel

• University of Ottawa

In a recent homage to Storey’s work (Parker et al. in Small Bus Econ 62:1–21, 2024), Blackburn notes that “One of the key themes running throughout much of David’s work is that of ‘unevenness’” (p. 5). While I think this is a fair characterisation, I prefer the terms ‘variety’ and ‘divergence’, believing these to better capture the remarkable and r...

Research Summary Following a growing body of research indicating that most high‐growth entrepreneurial firms are “one hit wonders,” this article leverages Canadian survey and administrative data to investigate the relationship between recent entrepreneurial income and growth barriers, on the one hand, and the growth intentions of established firms,...

This paper contributes to research at the intersection of institutional theory and the emerging literature on institutional imprinting by studying how the persistence and decay of founding institutional imprints affect network-based innovation strategies in small firms during later stages of economic transition. In do so, we are able to investigate...

Using a tension lens, this paper explores how academic and non-academic staff who teach, practice and support entrepreneurship manage tensions associated with entrepreneurship-related activities, and how individuals’ tension management influences these activities in university settings. We draw on three theoretical perspectives (contingency, parado...

Enthusiasm for crowdfunding’s ability to fill gaps in the provision of entrepreneurial finance continues among academics, policymakers and practitioners. In this, increasing attention has been paid to the geography of crowdfunding. This work has provided important evidence on various spatial influences on the location of platforms and campaigns and...

Recent contributions to the literature on small firm growth have been marked by a growing sense of frustration with the state-of-the-art and what it implicates in both theory and policy. In short, while growth episodes appear relatively common, a tiny proportion of firms sustain growth and ‘scale’. This calls into question the very basis upon which...

Research Question/Issue: Innovation is a consistent feature of studies of transition and transformation. State ownership as the engine of innovation and technological change may be juxtaposed with the “liability of stateness” and the notion that “privatization works”. This study seeks to investigate the relationship between legal ownership and inno...

This review examines how family businesses manage family-related conflicts that occur at three interfaces: family-business, family-ownership, and family-business-ownership. We find that work-family conflicts, conflicts of interest, and relationship conflicts are prevalent family-related conflicts. Four conflict management strategies are frequently...

Highlights • There is considerable variety in academics' attitudes towards universities' third mission. • Research inactive faculty are more sympathetic to third mission goals than even applied research faculty. • Women and younger colleagues are more ambivalent about the third mission. • Faculty at universities that incentivize teaching tend to...

The empirical evidence that innovation policies often lead to innovation additionality is long-standing. However, innovation is an intermediate outcome. Innovations are important to the extent that they contribute to some broader goal, such as the competitiveness of firms and economies. To this end, we take exporting as an important indicator of co...

The literature on lending to small firms has primarily focused on the mechanisms and methods used to evaluate entrepreneurs and businesses and on the types of firms that are more likely to experience unfavourable application outcomes. That is, the focus of most empirical research is on supply-side decisions. The current research attempts to shed so...

Drawing upon data from the fifth UK Innovation Survey, this article sheds light on how management choices on the nature of appropriation relate to management choices on the degree of openness within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To this end, our findings indicate a threshold effect of both informal and formal appropriation mechanisms o...

Drawing upon data from the 2007 UK Survey of SME Finance, the current analysis is concerned with the extent to which growth firms are discriminated on price in loan markets, or, more simply, the extent to which growth firms pay more for credit. Given relatively small turndown rates historically (Vos et al. in J Bank Finance 31(9):2648–2672, 2007),...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to utilise a sample of 384 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who applied for external finance in the Beijing area of China to investigate the characteristics of firms against: the amount of external finance sought, the amount received, and the proportion of external finance which was received from the...

Collaboration with geographically distant partners may enhance a firm’s innovative performance. In practice, however, this may be complicated as personal contacts are more limited so that effective search and transfer of remote partners’ tacit knowledge is hampered. We tested the potential moderating role of R&D intensity which, by indicating techn...

Purpose – This paper aims to understand the factors associated with perceptions of venture capital as a barrier to innovation in an important subset of knowledge-intensive service firms – technology-based business services. A general and longstanding neglect of services in studies of innovation and a common focus of innovation studies on the availa...

The article presents an analysis of a large-scale survey with the aim of understanding differences in the open, interactive and distributed nature of external innovation relations amongst firms belonging to different industrial knowledge bases. The thesis is that the source of critical innovation relevant knowledge differs between industrial knowle...

Concerns that small firms encounter credit constraints are well entrenched in the literature, despite widespread empirical evidence that a relatively small proportion of small firms have their loan applications rejected. However, many firms may be discouraged from applying for fear of rejection. These businesses are the focus of this paper. Based o...

The ultimately unsuccessful predictive modelling literature has advanced our understanding of small firm growth processes no further than the descriptive and inflexible stage models approach achieved during the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, this paper suggests an alternative theoretical starting point. Drawing upon the, predominantly aggregate lev...

The current paper is concerned with exploring the role of absorptive capacity in extending the reach of innovation-related collaboration in high technology small firms. Drawing on survey data from a sample of 316 Dutch high-tech small firms, engaged in 1245 collaborations, we explore the relationship between R&D expenditure and distance to collabor...

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing amount of research on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and innovation. This book brings together current thinking on this subject from geographic and territorial perspectives. Researchers from across Europe and North America present contributions from a wide range of disciplinary approa...

This paper takes as its starting point an item of relatively recent academic orthodoxy: the insistence that ‘…interactive learning and collective entrepreneurship are fundamental to the process of innovation’ (Lundvall, 1992, p. 9). From this, academics have frequently taken “interactive” to imply “inter-organisational” and, whilst one might be con...

This paper explores the geographical distance of innovation collaborations in high tech small firms. We test if absorptive capacity is a key determinant. Drawing on survey data from a sample of 316 Dutch high-tech small firms, engaging in 1.245 collaborations, we find most partners to be ‘local’. However, controlling for a variety of potential infl...

Studies of innovation networking have frequently been concerned with the occurrence of dyadic relationships and with their apparent impact on simple measures of firm-level innovation outputs. This paper takes a more detailed look by analyzing the connection between different types of innovation and forms of networking. Based on the market novelty o...

A cursory review of the industrial policies of most nations suggests that exporting matters. Identifying exporting firms and facilitating their endeavours (or encouraging others to emulate them) are familiar policy themes, and studies of the relationship between firm characteristics and the propensity to export are common in the academic literature...

Within the UK the levels of female entrepreneurship are considerably lower than in many of its peer countries. As part of a strategy to remedy this apparent shortfall, and to improve the environment for existing female-owned businesses, the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) launched a ‘Strategic Framework for Women’s Enterprise’ in 2003. A...

It is generally held that “…a strict reliance on a market system will result in underinvestment in innovation, relative to the socially desirable level” (Martin & Scott, 2000, p. 438). Innovation is essentially a speculative process. In the main, resources must be committed prior to revenue receipts (Brophy & Shulman, 1993). Furthermore, costs and...

Drawing upon a sample of 256 small firms who applied for bank loans, the current paper is concerned with the extent to which ‘innovativeness’ is associated with a lower level of loan application success. The paper records the proportion of loan successfully applied for and estimates a series of tobit models utilising a number of proxy measures for...

Employing data from a sample of 1,161 small firms, the paper draws broad comparisons between patterns of innovation expenditure and output, innovation networking, knowledge intensity and competition within Knowledge‐Intensive Business Services (KIBS; N = 563) and manufacturing firms (N = 598). In so doing, KIBS are further disaggregated along lines...

Though KIBS constitute only a small proportion of all services, researchers frequently accord them a significance beyond that indicated by their share in employment or value added (Tether & Hipp, 2002; Gallouj, 2002). For example, KIBS are held to play ‘an increasingly dynamic and pivotal role in ‘new’ knowledge-based economies’ (Howells, 2000, p....

Over the last 20 years, network-based models of innovation-led economic development have grown increasingly popular to both the polity and the academy. In contrast to earlier linear conceptions, innovation is viewed as a systemic phenomenon in which interactive learning and cooperative entrepreneurship are fundamental. The way that systems and, in...

Drawing upon data from a sample of 597 small manufacturing firms, the current paper hopes to contribute to the emerging body of empirical literature, which seeks to distinguish the characteristics of more and less innovative small firms. Importantly, in so doing, a definition of innovation is employed which, at least partially, resolves many of the...

Drawing upon a sample of 1345 ‘Northern British’ SMEs, the current paper seeks to investigate patterns of association between firm-level innovativeness and a variety of indicators of skills, skill requirements and training activity. In so doing, the paper is able to distinguish between types and level of innovation (i.e. product or process, novel o...

Employing data, from a recent survey of Scottish and Northern English Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), the current paper provides new evidence of the extent to which perceptions of environmental uncertainty (dynamism, complexity and hostility), along a number of dimensions, discriminate between small firms engaged in various levels of pr...

This article uses Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation techniques of a large-scale survey to examine the effect of firms' innovation activ ties on their growth performance. The survey, covering 1347 respondents. is the largest and most definitive assessment of enterprise in Scotland and Northern England. In this article we employ four measures o...

This article uses Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation techniques of a large-scale survey to examine the effect of firms’ innovation activities on their growth performance. The survey, covering 1347 respondents, is the largest and most definitive assessment of enterprise in Scotland and Northern England. In this article we employ four measures o...

Drawing upon a sample of 597 small and medium-sized manufacturing firms, this article investigates the extent to which cooperation for innovation is associated with firm-level product and process ‘innovativeness’ and, where collaborative relationships are reported, the factors which influence their spatial distribution. With respect to the former i...

The data presented here were collected as one component of a project aimed at developing a regional innovation strategy for the West Midlands region of England. Like most regional policy measures the regional innovation strategy programme was driven by concern over widening economic performance differences between (European) regions and was intende...

The requirement for small firms to collaborate, as a means to supplementing and complementing limited internal resources, has dominated much of the academic and policy debate on regional development and small firm innovation throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. However, relatively little empirical work has sought to look further than simple frequen...

The paper considers the relative performance (along a number of parameters) of a sample of 228 small manufacturing firms categorised by level of innovation. Whilst innovators appear no more likely to have experienced some form of sales or employment growth, they are significantly more likely to have grown more. In other words, the innovators' growt...

Based within the West Midlands region of England, the current paper considers the relative characteristic of product innovators and non-innovators along seven dimensions of strategy. Data was collected, by means of a remotely administered survey, as part of the development of a Regional Innovation Strategy and innovators were defined using a "rate...

MARK S. FREEL IS A LECTURER IN THE Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. This paper seeks to understand the nature and extent of barriers to innovation within a sample of small manufacturing firms. After identifying from the literature four broad categories of constraint (finance, management and marketing, skilled lab...

This paper investigates the funding environment facing product innovating small manufacturing firms and both supports and contradicts a number of “stylised facts” which have emerged over the last decade. Amongst the key findings it appears that, whilst innovators were no more nor less likely to have sought external funds, they were significantly le...

Based on a sample of 245 West Midlands manufacturers, this paper investigates small firms’ perceptions regarding the skills (and skill sources) required to improve innovation. While there are very few observed differences in perception between the more and less innovative firms (the employment of graduates is a notable exception), a number of inter...

This paper draws on case and interview material, from research with entrepreneurs in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to examine the process of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial learning in SMEs. The cases have been drawn from different sectors including services, manufacturing and technology-based sectors such as hydraulics, and softwa...

Whilst considerable work has addressed the characteristics of innovative small firms and their aggregate contribution to economic growth and development, the internal processes of learning and innovation have remained relatively neglected. Drawing upon evolutionary ideas within economics and the broader social sciences, this paper begins the develo...

Based on a number of detailed, in-depth, cases selected from 30 face-to-face company interviews and placed in the context of the literature, this paper will argue that targeted financial support of start-ups, the notion of “picking winners”, is not a viable alternative to blanket cover. These selected cases serve to illustrate the complexity and va...

Drawing upon data from the 4th UK Innovation Survey, the current paper attempts to discriminate firms on the basis of the reach of their innovation networks. Both structurally and strategically, what characterizes firms collaborating with more distant partners, relative to their locally embedded counterparts? Principal amongst our findings we note...

Thesis (Ph.D.)