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Small business start‐ups create most of the new jobs in our economy. It is an attractive argument to those who want governments to support small businesses. But is it true? Or are large firms the ones that generate most jobs? Michael Anyadike‐Danes, Mark Hart and Karen Bonner examine a long‐running and acrimonious dispute.

This paper examines the extent to which marketing assistance administered to a group of high performing Northern Ireland SMEs led to improved export revenue growth. Standard OLS models provided no evidence to support the view that marketing grants substantially improved the export performance of assisted firms; however, substantial impacts were detected when treatment models were estimated, indicating that selection into marketing assistance tended to be a non‐random event. Marketing assistance was found to be a highly effective policy tool when targeted towards SMEs already active in export markets and/or involved in product innovation. From a methodological standpoint the analysis highlights the potential benefits of using other grant information within the treatment model as a means of uncovering additional important information on firm level characteristics that might otherwise have been missed.Small firms, exports, government assistance, marketing grants, Heckman,

External partnerships play an important role in firms’ acquisition of the knowledge inputs to innovation. Such knowledge acquisition may be interactive - involving exploration and mutual learning - or non-interactive - involving exploitative activity and learning by only one party. Here, we consider how firms’ innovation objectives influence their choice of interactive and/or non-interactive knowledge search. We conduct a comparative analysis for Spain and the UK, which have contrasting innovation eco-systems and regulation burdens. Three empirical results emerge. First, we find strong support for complementarity between non-interactive and interactive knowledge search. Second, we find that where firms have innovation objectives relating to product or service improvement, they are more likely to establish non-interactive search strategies. Third, the innovation objective of reducing environmental impact is significantly related to both, interactive and non-interactive knowledge acquisition strategies. This is likely related to the increasing awareness of the need to promote an agenda based on sustainable growth.

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In this article, we develop a gendered analysis of the expectations of venture growth by nascent entrepreneurs. Male entrepreneurs are notably over represented in the small cohort of firms that attain growth; to explore this phenomenon, we draw upon expectation theory during the nascency period to analyse the antecedents of growth outcomes. To refine this analysis, we factor in risk propensity measuring the impact of the 2008 financial crisis upon fundraising plans. Using UK data gathered between 2002-2020 from 5,490 nascent entrepreneurs to test our hypotheses, we found that those with the greatest levels of start-up capital and high levels of risk tolerance had the highest expectations of growth and were likely to be male. This small cohort of growth oriented entrepreneurs were termed 'deviant men' given their outlier status. Women became more cautious after the crisis so even those with similar access to start-up capital as the deviant men had lower expectations of growth. We conclude by noting that at the nascency stage, expectations of growth are a critical influence upon future outcomes; a small cohort of deviant men has the highest expectations of growth, with women disadvantaged by gendered risk adversity.