Professor Tim Vorley

The introduction and widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence in the professions has the potential to deliver a number of critical public goods, such as widening access to justice and healthcare through AI-powered professional services. Yet, the deployment of AI in the professions does not come without challenges, exemplified by the concerns about explainability, privacy, and human agency. In this paper, we explore how these issues may give rise to dark sides of AI in professional services and illustrate how an uncoordinated process of adoption and deployment can threaten the scope of AI-powered services. In particular, we illustrate how the adoption and deployment of AI in services may undermine the fiduciary duty between clients and professionals that, so far, has safeguarded the relationship between them, creating a ‘market for lemons’ of professional services. We conclude with a reflection on plausible ways forward to facilitate and smooth the transition to AI-powered services.

Community businesses contribute to the economic and social wellbeing of the communities in which they operate. As a subset of hybrid organizations, community businesses have unique challenges and opportunities related to their community embeddedness. Our study adopts an institutional logic perspective to understand the evolutionary boundaries of community business, which we argue, are shaped by the interplay of tensions between the social, market and community logics. While existing literature discusses institutional logics from a dichotomous angle, focusing mainly on the social and market logics, we argue that the introduction of a third logic (i.e. community logics) has ramifications for the evolution of hybrid organizations. The different trajectories may have implications for the social, community and economic impact that organizations can have. We draw on 39 qualitative interviews to provide useful insights for policy and practice on supporting community businesses.

Innovation can be a key mechanism to address some of society's greatest challenges, or it can contribute to them. There is extensive conceptual academic literature focused on how policy can be used to create more positive societal and environmental impacts through innovation, however, little empirical evidence exists to understand to what extent innovation policy in particular embeds the principles of social and environmental sustainability into its discourse. We aim to address this lack of evidence by using a critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics approach to explore how UK Innovation Policy embeds the concepts of societal and environmental impact, and how it balances these at times conflicting paradigms into policy documents. We find that although there is some inclusion of key environmental and societal words these are predominately secondary to economic themes, signalling a ‘business as usual’ approach to innovation policy.

Development studies have paid less attention to the role of technological innovations and we are yet to understand how, and more importantly why, technological trajectories differ across countries. This gap becomes sharper as emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly important in addressing many world development challenges. Drawing on insights from institutional work literature, this paper develops a structure-agency interplay framework to unravel the various trajectories of emerging technologies at the national level and examines the development and diffusion of AI in Canada and China. The findings show that Canada’s stable institutional environment, reinforced through institutional work by various actors, generated a national AI trajectory driven by technology development through a strong focus on scientific research and ethics, with slower organic commercialisation of AI. In China, a dynamic and loose institutional structure characterised by lax regulations, low entry barriers, and high openness to novelties has resulted in a market-driven AI trajectory focused on technology commercialisation, with domestic digital giants and the government as dominant players. National-level dynamics in formal institutions, informal institutions, technologies, and actor strategies determine heterogeneous approaches to technology development and diffusion, giving rise to varieties of technological trajectories. The levels of institutionalisation exert different forces and create different spaces for institutional work across different geographical contexts.

The Advanced Producer Services (APS) sector, long considered to be the vanguard of the knowledge economy and world-city formation, is undergoing a digital transformation. Digital transformation entails an increased engagement with digital technologies in the operation, product offerings and strategies of APS firms, with potentially transformative implications. Such digitization processes are well-established in the morphing of finance into FinTech, with the other APS sub-sectors now allegedly catching-up as evidenced by the arrival of LegalTech, AccountTech, RegTech, PropTech, and AdTech. Moreover, the digital transformation could imply that Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) services are again becoming central to the APS complex after two decades of being largely omitted from world city research. Adopting an evolutionary economic geography perspective, we introduce a new approach that utilizes near real-time data sources to compare local technology spaces with the global picture of digital transformation in world cities. Building a dataset containing information from 40,754 APS start-ups and scale-ups derived from Dealroom.co, this paper explores the geographically uneven digital transformation of the APS sector across European and North American world cities. This allows gauging the extent of digital transformation within APS sectors for each selected city, develop new understandings of the division of labour between world cities, and highlight where sector coalescence between APS sectors is occurring and is more likely to occur. In the process we develop new technological indicators of world-cityness that can be used alongside the classic world city connectivity indicators.

With the structuring of subnational governance driven primarily by economic goals, an issue that has become increasingly overlooked is that of identity. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders from the Sheffield City Region, the paper builds on Jones and Woods’ framework of 2013 of ‘material’ and ‘imagined’ coherence, demonstrating the ‘imaginary’ challenge of remaking subnational governance in the context of rescaling from regions to city-regions. It shows that historical regional identities can persist even in the absence of associated material components of governance, and that rescaling can create asymmetries between material and imagined coherence, resulting in competing imaginaries that hinder the new subnational arrangements.

The world is in the midst of a digital transformation. An intensified prevalence and use of digital technologies is fundamentally changing organizations and economies. However, the notion of 'digital transformation' is both theoretically and empirically underspecified. This paper rethinks the digital transformation narrative theoretically by embedding the concept in concurrent debates about technological revolutions and neo-Schumpeterian innovation theory. Empirically, the paper specifies the digital transformation by analysing the technological composition of key start-up and scale-up companies in the knowledge-intensive services sector. Undertaking a technology space analysis of 40,754 start-up and scale-up companies derived from the near real-time Dealroom.co database, we analyse which technologies and application domains are currently converging, distilling of key elements of the digital transformation. The paper concludes that the transmission of digital technologies is often indirect through ‘key enabling technology clusters’ that connect the technological vanguard to application domains.

This article advances knowledge on the diversity and heterogeneity of women-led small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United Kingdom by analysing how gender intersects with ethnicity and place to influence their engagement in innovation. We adopt an intersectional perspective, and base our analyses on the Longitudinal Small Business Survey (LSBS) data of 29,257 SMEs over the period 2015–2018. Our findings suggest that despite their limited number, as well as firm size and industry sector constraints, women-led SMEs are actively engaged in innovation activities. In addition, our results on the effects of intersecting categories of gender, ethnicity and place on innovation, further emphasise the heterogeneity of women-led SMEs, both with regard to their likelihood to engage in innovation, as well as the place where innovation is most likely to occur. Implications for policy and practice are highlighted.

Despite the widely recognised importance of diversity for business performance, knowledge concerning the support needs of under-represented groups is still limited. We adopt an intersectional approach to analyse the challenges and support needs of ethnic minority entrepreneurs, and those with disabilities, to participate in entrepreneurial activity in the UK. Our qualitative data is based on focus groups and semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that engagement in entrepreneurship is influenced not just by minority status, but by the specific relations to other socio-demographic categories within which that status is embedded. Intersectional counter-frames form part of the strategies utilised by individuals to gain access to otherwise limited resources. We develop a conceptual model for promoting greater equality, diversity and inclusion, within an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and recommend a more holistic approach to realising inclusive economic growth. This includes adopting a hybrid/blended approach that combines targeted programs with the development of mainstream support programs.

The study of technical innovation in Professional Services has attracted growing interest among scholars, who have sought to analyze the process of organizational change and service transformation. However, very little attention has been devoted to understanding the process of adoption and diffusion of technical innovation in professional sectors. In this paper, we suggest that the relevance and peculiarity of institutional dynamics at play in the professional sectors warrant a specific focus aimed at laying out how they affect adoption and diffusion of technical innovation.

In particular, we highlight that cultural-cognitive and normative pillars, embedded in the classic or regulated professions, may significantly insulate professionals from efficient-choice lenses and act as either drivers or barriers of adoption of technical innovations depending on the nature of the technology in question. Our proposed hypothesis is that institutional mechanisms act as drivers for the adoption of trajectorial innovations i.e. technologies that improve existing sets of practices and routines, and as barriers for paradigmatic innovations i.e. technologies that substantively alter existing practices and/or strip away certain tasks from the hands of professionals.

Finally, we illustrate the role that social norms play as a transmission mechanism of cultural-cognitive and normative pressures.

The emergence of new industries that are not closely related to existing regional paths remains an underexplained process in evolutionary economic geography. This paper responds to this gap through a case study of a maturing ecosystem of activity related to artificial intelligence in Montreal. Conceptually it brings together recent thinking in economic geography about agency in path development with complementary concepts from the literature on technological innovation systems. The empirical findings demonstrate the role of multiple agents in system building and legitimation activities that have varied across pre-formative and formative phases of new path development in this analytical knowledge field.

SMEs are the lifeblood of economies around the world. They play an important role in productivity growth, which is crucial for developed economies as they adjust to major trends such as the industrial revolution, an aging population, and changes in the nature of work. This study maps the SME productivity research landscape by way of a systematic literature review focusing on the direct, indirect, as well as mediating/moderating factors that enable or constrain productivity in SMEs. We review 109 empirical studies and highlight the fragmented nature of the extant research in this field. Our thematic analysis identifies six key themes, namely organizational environment, organizational capabilities, investments, types of innovation, external knowledgebase and commercialization. By taking stock of existing knowledge, we highlight critical gaps and methodological issues that limit our understanding of SME productivity. We propose a future research agenda to address current shortcomings and advance knowledge on this topic. Implications for policy are also discussed.

This paper explores how local communities in formerly industrialized places make sense of industrial decline and how the historical experience of industrialism has influenced the subsequent development of local entrepreneurship cultures. Based on a study with entrepreneurs and policymakers in Doncaster, a post-industrial English town in South Yorkshire, the paper demonstrates how legacies of the past persist through local informal institutions and permeate local perceptions of place and opportunity, stymieing the development of an entrepreneurship culture in the locality. Drawing on Cresswell’s three-dimensional framework of place, the paper shows how place meanings can lag significantly behind material transformation and slow the adoption of new practices. The study reflects on these challenges and discusses the policy implications.

This paper examines how family members support each other’s entrepreneurial activities through sharing resources created at the business-level. Drawing on the concept of ‘enterpriseness’ the study examines the flows between a family and the business and how it influences the impacts of the businesses on the family (enterpriseness). We capture the enterpriseness by focusing on entrepreneurial families where more than one member is an owner-entrepreneur. Through in-depth interviews with entrepreneurial families in Mexico, we show how different forms of capital resources emerging from multiple businesses flow back into the family and contribute to enterpriseness. The entrepreneurial family enables access to human, social and financial capital resources that are easily mobilized and combined by other members for their multiple firms, showing a subsequent effect to the business-level. Consequently, enterpriseness influences entrepreneurial behaviours which have a variety of consequences for the entrepreneurial family and their businesses. The paper concludes with a number of contributions to theory.

There is a lack of understanding of how social enterprises with their partners co-create opportunities to concurrently generate both social and economic value across the pyramid. Drawing on evidence from multiple case-studies, this paper addresses this gap to further our understanding of opportunity co-creation by social enterprises. We find that social enterprises co-create opportunities to simultaneously generate social and economic value with both the top of the pyramid (TOP) and bottom of the pyramid (BOP) partners; we thus call them Transcending Pyramid Social Enterprises (TPSEs). Opportunity co-creation comprises commercialising the social opportunity characteristics of prevalence, relevance, and accessibility to create both the demand and supply sides of a market. Supply side opportunity co-creation involves fulfilling institutional voids, developing relational capital with the BOP, and meeting the needs of the BOP. Demand side opportunity co-creation involves generating market access to the TOP, raising awareness of value generated by TPSEs, and fulfilling the needs of TOP customers. Co-created opportunities are thus capable of both addressing the economic and social and/or environmental issues of the BOP and meeting the altruistic and consumption needs of the TOP. The implications for social enterprises, their partners, and policy makers are discussed.

This paper explores to what extent the new localism has effectively empowered local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) and local communities to deliver localized, place-based enterprise policy at the subnational level. It identifies externally imposed constraints on local enterprise policy-making that have seen this reoriented towards the support of high-growth potential businesses. However, the scope and focus of enterprise policy at the LEP level contrast with heterogeneous local realities and needs, highlighting a pronounced rhetoric–reality gap. With little evidence of local knowledge transcending policy boundaries, the paper reveals that the current arrangements constrain local agency and reduce the effectiveness of enterprise policy-making at the local level. It concludes that the power to develop localized, place-based enterprise policy exists only in rhetoric.

Purpose.
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the role of public policy in the formation of entrepreneurial ecosystems in Poland.

Design/methodology/approach.
The paper assumes a qualitative approach to researching and analysing how public policy enables and constrains the formation of entrepreneurial ecosystems. The authors conducted a series of focus groups with regional and national policy makers, enterprises and intermediaries in three Polish voivodeships (regions) – Malopolska, Mazowieckie and Pomorskie.

Findings.
The paper finds that applying the entrepreneurial ecosystems approach is a challenging prospect for public policy characterised by a theory-practice gap. Despite the attraction of entrepreneurial ecosystems as a heuristic to foster entrepreneurial activity, the cases highlight the complexity of implementing the framework conditions in practice. As the Polish case demonstrates, there are aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems that are beyond the immediate scope of public policy.

Research limitations/implications.
The results challenge the view that the entrepreneurial ecosystems framework represents a readily implementable public policy solution to stimulate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial growth. Insights are drawn from three regions, although by their nature these are predominantly city centric, highlighting the bounded geography of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Originality/value.
This paper poses new questions regarding the capacity of public policy to establish and extend entrepreneurial ecosystems. While public policy can shape the framework and system conditions, the paper argues that these interventions are often based on superficial or incomplete interpretations of the entrepreneurial ecosystems literature and tend to ignore or underestimate informal institutions that can undermine these efforts. As such, by viewing the ecosystems approach as a panacea for growth policy makers risk opening Pandora’s box.

The effects of regulations on small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) have garnered significant political attention internationally, yet, in the academic literature, these effects remain contested. This article presents findings from a systematic literature review of qualitative evidence on the effects of regulation on SMEs. It sets out the strengths of qualitative approaches in relation to more prominent and influential quantitative approaches. It conducts a thematic synthesis of the qualitative research to develop a conceptual framework that provides a processual, embedded understanding of the effects of regulations on SMEs. The conceptual framework highlights four key, interconnected processes: identification–interpretation; strategization; negotiation; and adaptation. This conceptual framework generates insights into dynamic and potentially indirect effects of regulations in relation to a complex array of influences external to and within the business. On the basis of these insights a new research agenda is proposed.

Purpose.
Focusing on the family as the central unit of analysis, the purpose of this paper is to examine how entrepreneurial families, with more than one owner/entrepreneur, utilise social capital in a challenging institutional environment.

Design/methodology/approach.
The empirical focus of this paper is the institutional context of Mexico and how it impacts on entrepreneurial families and their access to social capital. The authors employ an in-depth qualitative approach to understand entrepreneurs’ perspective as being part of an entrepreneurial family. A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with multiple respondents of each entrepreneurial family.

Findings.
This study shows that social capital allows members in the entrepreneurial family to access a wider pool of resources to utilise to benefit their ventures, while also helping them to operate in a challenging institutional environment. It also illustrates how social capital is used to overcome institutional asymmetries.

Originality/value.
This paper contributes to research by examining the links between institutions and entrepreneurial families through a focus on social capital. It provides a nuanced understanding of how the entrepreneurial family serves as an intermediary through which social capital gives family members access to resources and capabilities to enable their pursuit of entrepreneurial endeavours and overcome the institutional challenges they face in Mexico.

Purpose.
The aim of this paper is to unpack the nature of business innovation and understand the impact on regional innovation and competitiveness.

Design/methodology/approach.
The paper is based on a qualitative study of Advanced Manufacturing and Advanced Materials businesses in the Sheffield City Region (UK). Interviews were conducted with 23 firms in exploring how innovation in the firm translates to innovation-led regional economic growth.

Findings.
The paper demonstrates that there is a tendency of owner managers to focus on innovation in terms of the development of new products, processes and/or services. Many of the businesses interviewed were technologically innovative, yet there was little evidence of wider business model innovation. This, the authors conclude, stymies regional innovation and with it regional economic growth.

Research limitations/implications.
This study is based on a case study of the Sheffield City Region and is not generalizable, but offers insights into the nature of business model innovation which are valuable in generating questions for further research.

Practical implications.
The paper highlights the need to think of innovation in broader terms and the scope of business model innovation to not only improve the performance of firms but also regional economic growth.

Originality/value.
Business model innovation is a growing domain of the literature, and this paper highlights how narrow interpretations of innovation may serve to limit growth business growth, and with it regional economic growth.

This article examines how the legacies of the past in peripheral post-industrial places serve to shape current and future entrepreneurial activity, and with it local economic resilience. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with key regional stakeholders, the article reveals how peripheral post-industrial places are constrained by their histories. This is found to be manifest in different ways, such as low aspirations, generational unemployment and a loss of identity which are in turn compounded by negative perceptions of place and opportunity. These issues culminate in institutional hysteresis at the local level and constrain entrepreneurial ambition. The article argues that the rigidity and reproduction of informal institutions continues to stymie economic resilience and growth. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for entrepreneurship in peripheral post-industrial places as well as with recommendations for policy.

There has been increasing interest in understanding the factors that contribute to the development of employee resilience. Despite such interest, there is a dearth of research examining the contributory role played by HR practices in enhancing employee resilience. Looking at the context of Pakistan’s telecommunications sector and deploying a qualitative methodology, this paper examines the impact of HR practices on employee resilience. The findings indicate that four key areas of HR practices – job design, information sharing and flow within an organisation, employee benefits (monetary as well as non-monetary), and employee development opportunities – enable the development of employee resilience. Consequently, the effective implementation of HR practices in these areas has been the key factor for the development of employee resilience.

Drawing insights from the national systems of innovation and social entrepreneurship literature, this article examines how national systems of innovation (NSI) and social entrepreneurship interact to generate social innovation in emerging economies. Through the examination of a case study of the Emergency and Management Research Institute (EMRI), a public private partnership (PPP), social innovation is found to be an interactive bottom-up collective learning process where EMRI has developed a new model of social innovation. It also highlights the complex context in which social innovation occurs. As a boundary-spanning activity across the public and private sectors, the interactive learning process and associated capability building for social innovation has provided a catalyst for wider social reform and for the development and redesigning of NSI for social innovation-led value creation in emerging economies. Through such an approach, the EMRI has overcome the institutional voids and developed legitimacy through social innovation tailored to the local context; it thereby represents an alternative approach to the often top-down NSI organisations of developed economies.

The aim of this article is to examine the impact of institutional development on entrepreneurship in post-conflict environments. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Kosovar entrepreneurs the article highlights how the experience of fostering entrepreneurship in a post-conflict, new born state is distinct from transition economies. The article finds that Kosovo has not encountered the same institutional challenges which have stymied entrepreneurship in transition economies which have been hampered by ‘path extension’ of institutions. Instead there has been a ‘path break’ resulting in a reshaping of formal and informal institutions as supportive of entrepreneurship. However, while positive, the prevailing nature of much entrepreneurial activity is localized with only a limited impact on economic growth. The article concludes by making a number of contributions to institutional theory and policy.

This article examines the impact of corruption on entrepreneurship in transition economies. Utilising in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Bucharest, Romania, the article finds that despite economic reforms, corruption occupies a pervasive space which impacts entrepreneurial strategy. In both countries, entrepreneurs operate within a ‘devil’s circle’, in which they are unable to operate entirely independent of corruption. This is caused by a combination of weak formal institutions and a weak entrepreneurial culture leading to entrepreneurs either seeking to avoid the attention of government officials by hiding some or all of their activities with little prospect of sanction, limiting their growth aspirations, or engaging in corruption as a way of furthering their activities. The research contributes to understandings of corruption and its impact on entrepreneur strategies to avoid, minimise or benefit from it.

Universities are increasingly challenged to become more socially and economically relevant institutions. While this phenomenon has prompted a growing literature documenting the evolution of the contemporary university, it remains at once both too broadly conceptualized and overly fragmented. Thus, while these literatures continue to grow, they remain largely undertheorized. This paper employs the concept of “entrepreneurial architecture” as a more nuanced perspective to understand this new mission of contemporary universities. This newly emphasized mission has been politically driven through public policy and funding. While providing a theoretical contribution to the study of the entrepreneurial university/university entrepreneurship, the paper also has broader implications for institutions and policymakers as a pragmatic approach.