Changes have been made to systems of publicly funded business advice to implement a 'strategic sounding board' role for business advisers. Previous literature has shown how this role could be modelled in a 'coupole'. The 'coupole' administers a programme but does not deliver it. The shifting of...

Changes have been made to systems of publicly funded business advice to implement a ‘strategic sounding board’ role for business advisers. Previous literature has shown how this role could be modelled in a ‘coupole’. The ‘coupole’ administers a programme but does not deliver it. The...

Sarason et al. [Sarason, Y., Dean, 1, Dillard, J.F., 2006. Entrepreneurship as the nexus of individual and opportunity: a structuration view. J. Bus. Venturing, 21, 286-305] build upon Shane and Venkataraman's [Shane, S., Venkataraman, S., 2000. The promise of entrepreneurship as a held of...

The provision of advisory support to small firms is almost ubiquitous in OECD countries, although it is organised in different ways and is justified on slightly different grounds. In England publicly supported advisory services are provided through the Business Link (BL) network. Here, we...

In England, publicly supported advice to small firms is organized primarily through the Business Link (BL) network. Using the programme theory underlying this business support, we develop four propositions and test these empirically using data from a new survey of over 3000 English SMEs. We find...

Most advanced economies offer publicly financed advice services to start-up firms and SMEs. In England, local or regional Business Links organisations have provided these services, and divided their support into nonintensive one-off contacts providing information or advice and more intensive...

This paper argues that there have been three distinct phases of enterprise policy in the UK in the past 30 years: the 1970s saw no effective enterprise policy ('policy off'); the 1980s witnessed an attempt to increase the number of start-ups; and the 1990s saw a concentration on 'business...

To whom should potential new firm founders turn to for advice? This article identifies buzz as a mechanism to transfer the knowledge of who to turn to for advice. Previous work on buzz has linked it with clusters or compared local buzz with international pipelines of information. The interaction...