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HART stands for Highway Addressable Remote Transducer and refers to the protocol (basically the signalling method, message structure and transaction rules) used for digital communication amongst “smart” process instruments and their control room counterparts. But why a special protocol for the process field?

Recent research has demonstrated that small firm performance in Northern Ireland has benefited from the availability of a comprehensive and well‐funded programme of selective financial assistance provided by the Local Enterprise Development Unit (LEDU), the small business agency for the region. Such assistance to small firms was seen to overcome many of the constraints of doing business in a peripheral location such as Northern Ireland. However, one question remains unanswered by that research and that is the precise way in which LEDU financial assistance impacts upon business performance. One interpretation of the research to date could be that the relatively better performance of LEDU‐assisted small firms is due to the fact that they are more likely to be faster growing businesses in the first instance, because either they are self‐selecting in presenting themselves for LEDU assistance or else the LEDU engages in a “creaming” process, which results in the granting of assistance to the more successful firms in Northern Ireland. In order to probe further into the impact of LEDU assistance, it is necessary to examine the differential impact on growth of the wide range of support programmes and initiatives for small firms operated by the small business agency in Northern Ireland. This paper will report the results of the first stage of such an analysis by analysing the business performance of two broad groups of LEDU‐assisted clients who have received different levels of assistance in the 1990s – “Growth” and “Established” clients. The analysis is based on information drawn from a specially created database of approximately 1,600 small firms who were in receipt of LEDU financial assistance in the period 1991‐97. The analysis of the employment and turnover performance of LEDU‐assisted firms revealed that Growth clients grew faster than Established clients in the 1991‐97 period and provides tentative evidence that a more intense and directed package of assistance is clearly associated with faster business growth. The age of Growth firms was much older than Established LEDU clients and, therefore, this differential growth performance cannot be related to a simple life‐cycle explanation. The shift in LEDU policy in the 1990s towards a greater concentration of effort on firms with growth potential would appear to have been successful.

This study focuses on the use of export marketing information in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), an area that has previously attracted little academic research attention. It reports on the application of scales measuring instrumental/conceptual and symbolic export information use, using a random sample of UK exporters, to SME exporters of engineering and IT products. The results show that the scales are applicable within the specific context of the industrial SMEs surveyed and that levels of symbolic export information use are higher in these SMEs than in UK exporting companies as a whole. The latter is explained as a function of a shortfall in two areas: first, in available export marketing information, leading to greater dependence on “guesswork” and intuition; and second, in specialist marketing information‐processing skills on the part of SME export decision makers. The article concludes by appealing for an extension of export support for SMEs, to include the use of export information as well as simply its acquisition. It suggests that the scales tested here could be used both to diagnose the need for such SME support and to measure its effectiveness.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the factors that influence small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) performance and particularly, growth.

This paper utilises an original data set of 360 SMEs employing 5‐249 people to run logit regression models of employment growth, turnover growth and profitability. The models include characteristics of the businesses, the owner‐managers and their strategies.

The results suggest that size and age of enterprise dominate performance and are more important than strategy and the entrepreneurial characteristics of the owner. Having a business plan was also found to be important.

The results contribute to the development of theoretical and knowledge bases, as well as offering results that will be of interest to research and policy communities. The results are limited to a single survey, using cross‐sectional data.

The findings have a bearing on business growth strategy for policy makers. The results suggest that policy measures that promote the take‐up of business plans and are targeted at younger, larger‐sized businesses may have the greatest impact in terms of helping to facilitate business growth.

A novel feature of the models is the incorporation of entrepreneurial traits and whether there were any collaborative joint venture arrangements.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what sort of people become social entrepreneurs, and in what way they differ from business entrepreneurs. More importantly, to investigate in what socio‐economic context entrepreneurial individuals are more likely to become social than business entrepreneurs. These questions are important for policy because there has been a shift from direct to indirect delivery of many public services in the UK, requiring a professional approach to social enterprise.

Evidence is presented from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) UK survey based upon a representative sample of around 21,000 adults aged between 16 and 64 years interviewed in 2009. The authors use logistic multivariate regression techniques to identify differences between business and social entrepreneurs in demographic characteristics, effort, aspiration, use of resources, industry choice, deprivation, and organisational structure.

The results show that the odds of an early‐stage entrepreneur being a social rather than a business entrepreneur are reduced if they are from an ethnic minority, if they work ten hours or more per week on the venture, and if they have a family business background; while they are increased if they have higher levels of education and if they are a settled in‐migrant to their area. While women social entrepreneurs are more likely than business entrepreneurs to be women, this is due to gender‐based differences in time commitment to the venture. In addition, the more deprived the community they live in, the more likely women entrepreneurs are to be social than business entrepreneurs. However, this does not hold in the most deprived areas where we argue civic society is weakest and therefore not conducive to support any form of entrepreneurial endeavour based on community engagement.

The paper's findings suggest that women may be motivated to become social entrepreneurs by a desire to improve the socio‐economic environment of the community in which they live and see social enterprise creation as an appropriate vehicle with which to address local problems.

Millions of the British people have for some years now been struggling valiantly to live with hard times, watching them day by day grow worse but always hopefully that the cloud had a silver lining; that one day, reason and a sense of direction would prevail. Tyranny in many forms is a feature of history; the greatest epics have been risings of ordinary people to overthrow it. The modern form of tyranny is that of Money; the cruel and sinister ways in which it can be obtained and employed and the ineffectiveness of any measures taken to control the evils which result. Money savings over the years and the proverbial bank book, once the sure safeguard of ordinary people, are whittled away in value, never to recover. Causes always seemed to be contained within the country's own economy and industrial practices, and to this extent should have been possible of control. The complex and elaborate systems constructed by the last Government were at least intended for the purpose, but each attempt to curb excessive demands for more money, more and more for doing less and less— the nucleus of inflation—produced extreme reactions, termed collectively “industrial strife”. Every demand met without compensatory returns in increased work, inevitably led to rises in prices, felt most keenly in the field of food and consumer goods. What else would be expected from such a situation?

Preparing future elementary teachers to connect social studies content and skills with technology necessitates the integration of technology into teacher preparation methods courses. Such integration hinges on the identification of pre-service teachers’ level of Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK). These three knowledge areas help shape smart uses for educational technology beyond entertainment that utilize technology in educationally profitable ways. The TPACK model is useful for identifying the knowledge required by pre-service teachers for the purpose of wedding instructional technology to social studies content and instruction. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to describe and to analyze the integration of an instructional technology lesson in an elementary social studies methods course in a large Midwestern university. The study, specifically, describes and reports on 25 pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the utilization of a social studies software technology called Timeliner. The study reports on the level of TPACK awareness of the study’s pre-service teachers and offers implications related to instructional technology integration in elementary social studies methods courses.

In this paper we present a model that shows how ability, efficacy, motivation and desirability affect performance in the task of recognizing new environmental opportunities. Drawing on decades of research, ranging from Bandura’s landmark studies of self‐efficacy to Lindsley et al. model of efficacy‐performance spirals, we provide a series of propositions for future research and identify a range of practices for achieving increased performance through enhanced ability, efficacy, motivation and desirability.