Research from the Entrepreneurship Centre

Accelerate Cambridge nurtures early stage ventures from the initial venture creation, to launch and beyond. The EVER project is a longitudinal qualitative study of these ventures which aims to identify and understand patterns of strategic decision making. This research contributes to two types of outputs:

1. Teaching case studies for use by the Centre and more widely by other departments at CJBS and the University of Cambridge.
2. New theoretical insights into successful model of venture creation.

Contact: Dr Monique Boddington

This research studies the processes of entrepreneurial teams. The objective is to understand how team processes emerge and evolve during the startup phase of an entrepreneurial venture. This research aims to contribute to team literature by generating novel insights on the dynamics of team processes within the unique context of startup entrepreneurial teams. In addition to academic contributions, this study aims to generate actionable knowledge for both startup entrepreneurial teams and accelerators in developing programme structures that optimise team work in startup ventures.

Contact: Professor Andreas Richter

Venture development organisations (eg accelerators and incubators) have proliferated in the startup ecosystem. Despite their attraction, often enough the impact of these cohort-based structured programmes is unclear. Pitch@Palace offers a good example of such organisations, which has managed to successfully attract considerable amount of attention from both business and startup communities and the media in the recent years. This research project explores the impact of Pitch@Palace on the entrepreneurial journey and the success of the participating startups.

The Centre recently contributed to a report, convened by Barclays, entitled “Scale-up UK: Growing Business, Growing Our Economy” which addresses the critical need to break down barriers to small business scaling-up and develop solutions to help UK companies grow and create more jobs.

The report draws on research from teams at Cambridge Judge Business School, which focused on fostering effective management and skill sets for sustained growth, and Oxford Saïd Business School, which examined the role of finance in scaling-up by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The report stemmed from discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos involving both universities and business groups about the need for more effective small business scale-up. Cambridge Judge Business School made six key recommendations for start-ups: have a commitment to grow; build a strong, broad management team; strike partnerships and other alliances; develop formalised systems to expand; identify and implement core competences; and use competitive strengths to spread into new markets for economies of scale.

Contact: Professor Stelios Kavadias

Read the Barclays Scale-up UK: Growing Business, Growing Our Economy report.

Absence of proper management system, ie the ways in which the CEO and other top management team members organise their managerial work at the helm of the company, is a major determinant of low productivity prevalent among SMEs. This project aims at exploring the potentials of digital business training to enhance managerial capability of SMEs in designing effective management system to boost their productivity output. The training combines academic educational rigour with best business practices to equip top managers of SMEs with right skills and capabilities to take their business to the next level. The programme offers limited opportunity for managers to join free of charge.