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Previous studies have shown how the nature of businesses and the strategies pursued by their owners are affected by the personality traits of their owners. These personality traits can be formed in the early stages of life due to experiences and the surrounding context, where religion is a particularly important aspect of this context. This study aims to explore how religion affects entrepreneurial activities through the personality traits created.

This study uses interviews with 43 Muslim entrepreneurs in Scotland to examine the role played by religion. This ensures that the national institutional context is kept consistent but also allows an in-depth examination of relationships, which are likely to be interlinked and recursive.

The traits created influence the nature of the entrepreneurial activities undertaken with the potential to harm and support the entrepreneurial endeavours. It is the combination of personality traits that are formed which have the greatest effect. As such, it is found that Muslim entrepreneurs display less openness and creativity associated with new ideas, but this does not reflect risk aversion rather hard work in itself is valued, and patience combined with an external locus of control mean entrepreneurial behaviours are not altered to boost poorly performing business activities.

For Muslim entrepreneurs in Scotland, their traits explain why growth may not be a foremost consideration of these entrepreneurs rather they may value hard work and meeting the ideals of formal and informal institutions associated with religion. For those seeking to support minority groups through the promotion of entrepreneurship, either they must seek to overcome these ingrained traits or alter support to complement the different objectives held by Muslim entrepreneurs.

Williams and Williams (2012, 2017) find multiple entrepreneurial motivations are experienced by entrepreneurs in deprived areas at different points in time. Drawing on this prior work this study aims to explore how and why the shifted motivations evolve, as well as, what factors cause this change in deprived areas. The work draws upon temporal motivational theory (TMT) that considers the influence of individuals' needs in determining their time-sensitive motivation.

Six semi-structured interviews with actual entrepreneurs are used to collect qualitative data from deprived areas of Nottingham, which is one of the most deprived cities in the UK. The study employs Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to consider each entrepreneurial endeavour as a unique journey to investigate the shifting of motivations.

A polarization is found in terms of how entrepreneurial motivations evolve in deprived areas. In considering the first task-specific entrepreneurial motivation, time plays a role either in accumulating job dissatisfaction and increasing confidence led by accumulated experience, or in creating random chances that enable individuals to realize that they are able to use existing skills and experiences to start a business. Regarding the second task-specific entrepreneurial motivation when the business becomes more established, it is usually stimulated by increased confidence based on perceived progress. The use of self-help methods and downward comparison found in this study should be noted as they help to re-consider individuals' needs in deprived areas.

This study produces a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of the time effect on shifted motivation at different entrepreneurial phases in a deprived context, which contributes to enrich theoretical knowledge and raise policymakers' awareness of entrepreneurial motivations from these marginalized groups.

Studies have suggested that entrepreneurship is a key mechanism for rejuvenating and facilitating economic growth in deprived areas. To provide further understanding of the persistently low entrepreneurial intentions found in deprived areas this chapter identifies key mechanisms and theoretical frameworks that link the formation of appropriate human capital to the prevailing environment, and that influences may flow in both directions. This contributes to the existing literature to provide a fuller understanding of interest to policy-makers of why past interventions have struggled to boost entrepreneurial intentions and where new interventions may be most effective in generating more positive entrepreneurial intentions in deprived areas.

Enterprise education has been regularly cited as a tool which can be utilised to not only increase the level of entrepreneurship within an economy, but also the success of those enterprises created. This chapter explores the extent to which participation in enterprise education is associated with the adoption of new technology within new businesses since this is one way that businesses can remain competitive, not only within their own countries, but when competing internationally. Using data from the UK Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) survey, the study finds evidence that those firms undertaking enterprise education in the form of university-based schemes or government sponsored training programmes are more likely to be using newer technology. However, this relationship is relatively weak, and brings into question whether many enterprise courses offer effective value for money.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether being female increases the probability that an individual feels difficulty in obtaining finance is a barrier to starting a business. The study aims to extend this to examine if a pure gender effect exists or whether it is the interaction of gender with demographic, economic and perceptual characteristics that plays the most important role in the perception of financial constraint.

The data within this study are drawn from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) adult population survey between 2005 and 2007. The first stage of the study splits male and female respondents into separate sub‐samples and runs individual regressions on each portion of the sample. The second stage of the study combines the male and female portions of the sample to directly examine the differences in perceived financial constraint between genders.

The findings suggest that a greater proportion of women are solely constrained by financial barriers than their male counterparts. The gender of the respondent was also found to interact with a number of other personal characteristics in a significant manner.

This finding suggests that policymakers should be encouraged to market the availability of start‐up finance from various sources to encourage women to attempt to obtain the necessary finance rather than being discouraged at the first hurdle.

Although actual financial barriers faced by female entrepreneurs have been extensively studied, this is one of the first studies to focus on the concept of perceived financial constraints faced by potential female entrepreneurs.

This paper aims to examine the impact of developing more active web sites and increasing e-commerce on the relationship between innovation and growth performance in SMEs. Using the existing literature and empirical analysis the study seeks to consider the potential of engagement with the internet to achieve the often hard to attain ambition of both innovation and growth.

In order to examine the relationship, data are drawn from the Federation of Small Businesses' Lifting the Barriers to Growth Survey. In order to establish whether the use of more sophisticated web sites are associated with being an innovative high performance business, while controlling for other firm and entrepreneurial characteristics, multivariate analysis in the form of multinominal logits and discriminant function analysis are utilised.

The results suggest that although theoretically web sites with tools allowing interaction with customers or suppliers could benefit SMEs through a reduction in transaction costs and wider access to information, enabling them to jointly experience innovation and growth, in practice there is less evidence that this occurs. Those firms with active web sites are more likely to be innovative, but less likely to be both innovative and achieving growth.

The paper suggests a framework for analysing the impact of e-business at process level that can be used with other SME case studies.

These results suggest that further work must be undertaken to establish whether SMEs should be encouraged to make such investments and if so what additional help is required to ensure that investments in this digital infrastructure achieves an appropriate return on investment.

The results are of importance to both SMEs and policy makers providing insight into the nature of potential benefits from web site development using a large dataset. A clear need to investigate further how more innovative SMEs can benefit from company web sites and ecommerce to grow is identified.

There has been considerable debate about the impact that Foreign Direct Investment has upon home grown enterprise (Pathak et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to examine how foreign business ownership at the local level affects the decision of individual UK entrepreneurs to export their production.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data and ONS foreign firm employment data are used within this study. In order to control for entrepreneurial and firm characteristics, a multivariate approach is adopted with logit, ordered logit and multinominal logit regressions utilised.

It is found that the influence of foreign firms, as captured by their share of local employment, has a negative influence on domestic entrepreneurs’ probability of exporting, but has no significant effect on the intensity of these export activities.

The results suggest that local economies may not only become highly reliant on foreign employers, but also on local demand for domestic production. This means actions might be required to reduce this over-reliance to ensure the development of resilient local economies.

Unlike many other studies the relationship between the SME exports and foreign influence is considered at a local level. With the current UK government seeking to increase UK firms’ exports substantially, understanding this relationship is of key importance to policy makers.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the entrepreneurial activity, attitudes and social connections of four groups of ethnic minority females in the UK, with the aim of examining the extent of gender and ethnic background effects on nascent start‐up activities and the attitudes of women belonging to these ethnic minority groups.

A two‐stage approach is adopted to examine the situations of four main female ethnic minority groups using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) adult population survey for the UK. The first stage adopts a binary logistic approach to determine the importance of social networks, opportunity perception and risk aversion to the probability of being involved in nascent entrepreneurial activities. The second stage of analysis examines the differences in these perceptual variables to determine the extent to which different female ethnic minority groups are embedded in different social environments when attempting to start a business.

There are considerable differences amongst different ethnic groups in the level of entrepreneurial activity by women, their attitudes towards entrepreneurship, and the social capital available to them when starting a business.

The findings suggest that policy makers should take the differences by ethnic groupings into account when developing bespoke development policies designed to alleviate the barriers faced by women.

The paper is one of the first comparative studies focusing on women from different ethnic backgrounds. Rather than assuming homogeneity, or examining specific groups in isolation it allows the different conditions faced by prospective entrepreneurs from each group to be examined.

Although foreign direct investment and entrepreneurship are potential routes to recovery (Girma and Wakelin, 2001; Lyon et al., 2002), existing literature is divided on the relationship between the two. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of foreign investment on the local SME sector after the 2008 financial crisis.

Local authority district data from Great Britain is used to examine the influence of foreign firm employment on the size of the local SME sector as a proportion of all firms, and foreign firm influence on firm births in the locality. In order to control for local geographical, infrastructural and economic conditions regression analysis is used to examine the relationship between foreign business employment and indigenous business activities.

The potential for technological spillovers and spinout activities appears to dominate with firm birth rates higher where there is greater foreign firm employment. However, there is also evidence of crowding out in relation to the existing SME sector, which is found to be reduced in size where foreign influence through employment is greater.

The results here indicating a complementarity relationship between foreign influence on employment and firm births is important for policy makers looking to revive struggling local economies. However, the relevant support needs to be in place to maximise the benefit from the supply of new entrepreneurs generated.

Unlike many other studies the relationship between the SME sector, firm births and foreign influence is considered at a local level and where economic conditions are more uncertain and economic recovery is less taken for granted. A better understanding of the relationship allows more appropriate policy to be developed in order to aid local economies to recover.