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While no two businesses are the same, examples from Edinburgh Pakistani community convenience store owners illustrate business survival strategies developed in response to increased environmental challenges presented by changing consumer behaviour, increased competition and demographic variations. These are related to the individual’s motivation, experience and family business background, and include exiting the sector, gaining recognised qualifications and alternative employment, and involving second and third generations in expanding family business activities. The resulting smaller, but stronger, convenience(c)‐store sector continues to provide opportunities for individual businesses, thus maintaining the economic and social benefits for the ethnic minority community and the wider city population.

This paper aims to explore tacit knowledge and managers’ supervision styles in a sample of Edinburgh's Indian restaurants.

The paper reports a qualitative fieldwork of managers’ perceptions of their role in directing tasks, supervising operations and staff recruitment.

The research findings describe tacit knowledge contexts derived from restaurant owner‐managers directing operations.

This is an exploratory study of views and perceptions of a small sample of ethnic managers. It asks questions of tacit knowledge within Scottish‐based Indian restaurants, and attempts to place these within a cultural context of kinship networks.

The research questions how academic researchers may make nebulous concepts such as tacit knowledge accessible to practical hospitality managers, policy‐makers, students and teachers.

The research findings describe the context to relationships in small ethnic hospitality businesses. Conceptual development emerges from deductions made from literature, fieldwork, shadowing, interviews, and by asking questions.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the issues of dyslexia and the management of learning support within two Scottish suppliers of premier HE hospitality education: Napier and QMU universities of Edinburgh.

This exploratory, qualitative fieldwork outlines course managers', teachers' and disabilities support staff perceptions of dyslexia support. Students' views are noted, not interviewed. The paper describes the views of 12 of a sample of (eight female and four male) staff interviewees. Napier University and Queen Margaret University are post‐1990 “new” universities; Napier has a larger student/staff population than QMU.

The emergent findings in this paper highlight the fact that managers, teachers and support staff operate an under‐resourced and largely ad hoc system of dyslexic support, although Napier, with greater central funding, shows signs of more strategic insight with the appointment of a full‐time dyslexia coordinator with strategic potential. The findings pinpoint the strengths (personal attention) of decentralised support with ambiguity problems and the need for a generic centrally coordinated support system capable of codifying tacit experience into customised support packages for hospitality students.

The paper is a small exploratory study of the views and perceptions of dyslexia of course managers', hospitality teachers' and support staff from two of Edinburgh's new universities. Both have decades of internationally respected work in hospitality education and elsewhere in higher education.

The fieldwork draws attention to this situation and suggests ways to make concepts of dyslexia and disability more relevant to academic hospitality managers teaching in higher education and to those practising in the field.

The paper examines the proposition that, while dyslexia is a condition open to support and improvement, it is for many practitioners a vague concept. What emerges from the interviews is that disability and what to do about it seems to be an attitude of mind, a question of perceptions, frames of references, intangible properties: that the essence of enhanced dyslexic support is how to do things better. Napier and QMU give valuable ad hoc examples here on which to design future practice. What is needed is a systematic approach to design, implementation and sustainability, and an understanding of the tacitly held knowledge that underpins experience‐generated systems of knowledge. Bringing out such tacit and explicit notions of the complexity of perceptions of knowledge lies in future studies.

Local shopping is a topic that has been neglected for many years by both retail researchers and policy makers. However, in recent years it has come on to the agenda again, mainly because a number of government policy areas – including social exclusion, regeneration and sector competitiveness – have recognised the vital community role played by small shops, and the problems of maintaining their vitality and viability. Within that context, introduces the special issue of IJRDM which presents a number of papers on the general theme of retailing for communities that were given at the CIRM Conference held in Manchester on 13 September 2002. They fall into three main groups: local shopping areas; business strategy and operations; and, learning, training and support for small retailers. The papers illustrate the diversity of research that needs to be undertaken in this area, and there are close parallels with work being undertaken in other management and social science disciplines.

The purpose of this paper is to place on record the impact made on government policy and research by Autism Cymru, a small charity that existed in Wales between 2001 and 2014. The success of Autism Cymru resulted directly from philanthropic funding, applied with strategic vision and genuine ambition.

A retrospective, chronological viewpoint highlighting the creative process, drawing upon records held by the charity.

Autism Cymru initiated the concept and played a crucial role in steering the development of government policy for autism in Wales between 2001 and 2011. The charity also drove forward the initiative, which led to the establishment of the Wales Autism Research Centre at Cardiff University in 2010. This paper demonstrates that with astute philanthropic support, small learning disability/autism charities can elicit structural and sustainable change at the national level, leading to wide-ranging benefits for the communities they represent.

The strategic approach taken over 20 years ago in Wales by Autism Cymru, which led to the Welsh Government’s ASD Strategic Action Plan for Wales (Welsh Government, 2011), set in place a national policy model, which was then followed by The Scottish Strategy for Autism and the Northern Ireland Autism Strategy (Department of Health, 2013>; Scottish Government, 2011). The insightful and tenacious method used by Autism Cymru remains relevant today, demonstrating that any small charity supported by shrewd philanthropic funding can punch well above its weight by taking a planned, ambitious and strategic approach to policy, research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and discuss the main features and key challenges of an original post-graduate education program designed according to an innovative theoretical framework promoting design thinking in a rhizomatic approach. By involving different stakeholders, the aim of this entrepreneurship education program is to disseminate rhizomatic, design-based learning competencies and thereby contribute to revitalizing a region’s socio-economic fabric.

Through the use of a pilot case, the paper exemplifies the application of the design thinking approach combined with the rhizomatic logic. Design thinking enables dealing with the complexity, uncertainty, and ill-defined problems that often characterize a business reality while the rhizomatic process combines the production of collective knowledge through a non-linear, complex and emergent path that nurtures innovation.

This entrepreneurship education program exemplifies a viable strategy to deal with a regional economic crisis by engaging different local actors including enterprises, local institutions, municipalities, and universities. It demonstrates the potential value of a new educational approach as a powerful lever to activate the energy of people, their competencies, relationships, shared projects, and new entrepreneurial ventures. The first edition of the program offers ideas, practices, and challenges to all stakeholders of potentially similar education projects.

The depicted pilot case allows us to exemplify how a design thinking framework reinterpreted on the basis of a Deleuzian rhizomatic perspective can enable developing innovation as a way of overcoming difficulties and succeeding, an essential prerequisite for many entrepreneurial organizations today.

Discusses recent and current research into citizenship information needs at the School of Information and Media, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Reviews the most important results from two large‐scale, nation‐wide surveys (funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre) of the citizenship information needs of the UK public, highlighting those occasions where the response in Scotland differed significantly from national trends. Outlines a current project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, studying the impact of the use of information and communication technologies on the communication of parliamentary information in the UK, with particular attention being paid to the situation in the three new devolved legislatures – the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly of Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. The paper summarises the aims and objectives of the current project and provides a preview of the methodologies to be used, including the development of a novel interactive, electronically assisted interview technique.