Pitching in for growth

The Pitch@Palace series of entrepreneurial events has helped participating ventures to grow by fostering greater professionalism and enabling them to acquire new capital at a lower cost, concludes a new report by the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School.

While the UK has created a fertile climate for businesses to startup, British startup ventures have difficulty scaling up and therefore suffer a high “infant mortality” rate, says the report. Of 5.5 million small and medium-size enterprises reported in the UK economy in 2016, nearly 96% were “micro-size” businesses with less than 10 employees.

The report – entitled The Mission to Transform Start-Up Nation into Growth Nation – was issued on Thursday 8 November in conjunction with the finals of the latest Pitch@Palace event, held this year at Buckingham Palace. The research concludes that the continuing nature of support from Pitch@Palace through networking and other activities has been important to the success of participating ventures.

The Pitch@Palace series has so far held 9 programmes in the UK and 22 globally since it was launched in 2014.

The study was conducted independently by 3 Entrepreneurship Centre researchers at Cambridge Judge; Dr Keivan Aghasi,  Research Associate; Hanadi Jabado, Executive Director of the Centre; and Professor Stylianos (Stelios) Kavadias, Co-Director of the Centre, as part of a wider Entrepreneurship Centre research programme on the effectiveness of startup support programmes in delivering growth. The report is based on a final sample of 1,431 entries to the Pitch@Palace competition, comparing participants to a general pool of similar ventures.

“Whilst most entrepreneurial programmes operate under a finite date regarding the support they offer, Pitch@Palace’s footprint purposefully extends beyond the programmatic events and especially beyond the final event,” says the report. “Pitch@Palace enables its alumni to transform into more professional organisations post their programme participation [and alumni] have been able to grow significantly in size, diversity and maturity of their entrepreneurial management teams.

Pitch@Palace has increased the chances of participants receiving external funding, particularly those ventures based outside of large entrepreneurial clusters such as London, Cambridge and Oxford, the report adds.