PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Since 1999, I have been championing the cause of the small number of firms that grow quickly and make a disproportionate impact on prosperity and job-creation in the economy.  After launching the first ever Wales Fast Growth 50, there has slowly been an increased interest in high growth (or scale-up) firms as various research studies continue to confirm their significant contribution to the UK economy.  One of those which continues to highlight the importance of such firms is the annual review by the Scaleup Institute, which defines high-growth (scaleup) firms as those growing their employment numbers or turnover by more than 20% a year over a period of three years with at least 10 employees at the start of the period. According to their latest report published last month, there were 33,445 scaleups in the UK in 2019, which is an increase of 24% on 2013 (as against a growth in GDP of 12% over the same period).  More importantly, they employed 3.2 million people and genera...

This week, I have returned to Finland and, more specifically, the city of Turku where I am a visiting professor at the university. The occasion is the 35th European conference in entrepreneurship research which, as I was at the fourth event in Durham back in 1990, makes me feel extremely old. Of course, after having to avoid such gatherings for so long, it’s been wonderful to finally catch up with colleagues and friends to  discuss, face to face, some of the latest studies in my chosen field. It’s also given me an opportunity to find out what has been happening to the Finnish economy - one of the most competitive in the World - after the Covid-19 pandemic and especially the future prospects for entrepreneurship in this fantastic country. The good news for Finland is that according to its latest SME Barometer (which provides a comprehensive picture of Finnish small and medium sized firms’ perceptions of the economy - the predictions are optimistic after the downturn of last year. Th...

Looking back over the period since the pandemic began, possibly one of the most iconic memories for me was clear blue skies with no aircraft trails to be seen anywhere.  In fact, it got to the stage, with aeroplanes grounded across the World, that seeing a long white line moving across the sky – usually a cargo plane – became a rare phenomenon rather than an everyday occurrence. The fact that people were not travelling abroad and staying at home within their own countries meant that the environment improved across the World. There were news reports about smog disappearing in some the World’s most polluted cities and fish returning to rivers and waterways such as the canals of Venice. Given this, there was hope that the world may have turned an unexpected corner on climate change with one academic journal suggesting that global carbon dioxide emissions had fallen by 17% in April 2020 as compared to the previous year. Unfortunately, as economic activity has started again, that drop h...

Earlier this week, we celebrated the successes that women have achieved in every walk of life on International Women’s Day. Whilst there are giant steps being made towards greater gender equality across the world, the latest “ The Women in Work Index 2021 ” examining female participation in work in 33 OECD countries demonstrated both the challenges and, more importantly, the prizes that can be won from closing the gender gap within businesses globally. The good news is that the female labour force participation rate has been increasing since 2011 whilst the gender pay gap and the unemployment rate amongst women has been decreasing.  However, the pace of change is still not enough and it is estimated that, at the current rate, it will take 112 years for women to achieve salary parity with men even though closing the gap would generate £1.4 trillion pounds into OECD economies. Yet there are exemplars that show the rest of the world how to make a difference in this agenda with Iceland...

  Today’s businesses thrive on talented individuals at all levels of the workforce. As a result, the attraction and retention of employees with the right skills, experience and aptitudes has become one of the main competitive tools for firms across the globe. In particular, there is increasing evidence of a growing demand for millennials, namely those individuals born between 1980 and 1995 who have grown up with digital technology during the last two decades. There are currently around 14 million millennials in the UK yet many employers still have little understanding of this group despite the fact that they will be the future leaders in many organisations. This lack of knowledge has been examined by a report from the accountants KPMG. “Meet the Millennials” explores the characteristics of those who grew up during a period of rapid change and, more importantly, how companies can attract and retain them. According to the study, millennials are quite different to previous generations...

One of my favourite cities in the World is Dublin and it was great to be there again earlier this week to meet with high growth firms at the invitation of Enterprise Ireland, their development agency. Although it’s been nearly nineteen years since I left my job as a research fellow at University College Dublin, I have been a frequent returnee to the Emerald Isle. When I first arrived in Ireland in the mid 1990s, it was the beginning of the rise of the Celtic Tiger when the Irish economy expanded beyond the expectations and dreams of Irish people. In fact, between 1995 and 2000, it grew at an average rate of 9 per cent and, whilst there was some slowdown after this, it still had an average growth of 5.9 per cent in the years up to the crash of 2008. Not surprisingly, this success meant that Ireland was the country that many small economies, including Wales, wanted to emulate. How this growth happened is still a cause for debate amongst economists but it is probably due to a mix...

Back in 1940, the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population reported that "London acts as a continual drain on the rest of the country both for industry and population, and much evidence points to the fact that it is already too large.”  Such a sentiment is shared by many living in other parts of the UK seventy four years later, with evidence of a continued imbalance between investment into London as compared to other cities across the nation. In fact, many would not be surprised that, during the last decade, it has been responsible for a third of all economic growth within the UK. And according to a recent study, this is set to continue with the City of London showing a resurgence in the last twelve months and developments such as Silicon Roundabout in the East End of London - where companies such as Facebook, Google, Intel and Cisco have located to create  a high technology hotspot - attracting young people from all over the country into the c...

To the surprise of many, manufacturing continues to not only be an important sector within Wales, but is one of the few that is growing within a relatively flat recovery following the worse economic downturn since the 1920s. Indeed, manufacturing still accounts for 18 per cent of the Welsh economy, as compared to 11 per cent of the UK economy. More relevantly, the manufacturing sector has grown by 7 per cent between 2009 and 2010, mainly on the back of increased exporting activity. This is twice the growth rate for the rest of the Welsh economy over the same period. The other good news is that this growth in output is being accompanied by a growth in jobs. For example, the latest Labour Force Survey figures had shown that the number of manufacturing jobs in Wales had reached 153,000. This represented an increase of 14 per cent over two years as compared to a 2 per cent rise for the rest of the UK. But it is not only in Wales where we have seen a revival in a sector that ha...

On Wednesday, the Wales Fast Growth 50 initiative, which was started fourteen years ago to recognise the best of Welsh indigenous business, will again showcase companies that are making a real difference within their sectors and, more importantly at this time of economic difficulties, are creating jobs within their local communities. In fact, the fifty Welsh firms featuring on this year’s list, despite being only an average of twelve years old, will have collectively created nearly 10,000 jobs since they were started, which is an incredible achievement. When the Fast Growth 50 project was launched back in 1999, its inspiration was a similar, but far larger, initiative since 1982 run by Inc magazine. Indeed, the Inc 500, which identifies the 500 fastest growing firms in America, is a truly inspirational list that not only demonstrates incredible entrepreneurial feats within the World’s largest economy, but also gives clear pointers as to how future business practice is developi...

The main consumer trends for 2012, as identified by  trendwatching.com . View more documents from trendwatching.com

Fascinating slides on the global themes that affect every type of business, regardless of country in 2012. How will you take advantage of these over the next 12 months? Next week, a list of 12 Consumer trends for 2012.

They say a picture can take the place of a thousand words. Below is the relative contribution of the manufacturing industry and the public sector to the Welsh economy for the period 1997-2009. And the graph below is the overall monetary contribution of the manufacturing industry and the public sector (in £million) to the Welsh economy for the same period.

Last Wednesday, the latest GVA (Gross Value Added) data was released by the Office for National Statistics. It showed that this measure of prosperity had, following the recession of 2009, increased in all UK regions. The good news for Wales is that, along with the East Midlands, it had the fastest growth in GVA/head of population in 2010 at 3.3 per cent. Before anyone gets excited about this news, it can probably be explained by the fact that both regions are the most manufacturing intensive in Britain and that the brief export led recovery experienced in 2010 was beneficial, at least in the short term. In fact, the bad news was that Wales is still the poorest part of the UK with a GVA/head of £15,145. In contrast, the richest part of the UK – London – had a GVA per head of £35,026. And if we look at the growth of London since 1999, the year of the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales, the economic prosperity of Britain’s capital city has grown by 73 per cent. In co...

Arrived in Singapore yesterday afternoon for a four day jetlagged visit. Given the fact that the island economy is still seen as one of the growth regions of the World, it is always revealing to examine what has been going on in recent months. Certainly, growth has been outstripping that of the UK, with the Straits Times reporting that Singapore's economy is expected to grow by around 5 per cent in 2011. Despite this good news, the expansion of the economy is not expected to last and is expected to slow down next year - growth is estimated at  anywhere between 1 and 3 per cent. The last time Singapore experienced such weak growth was in 2008 when the economy expanded by just 1.5 per cent (although it contracted by 0.8 per cent in 2009). However, in calculating the state of the economy in 2012, the Ministry for Trade and Industry has not factored in downside risks to growth, such as that of a worsening debt situation leading to a full-blown financial crisis in...