Welcome to the Innovation in Business website and resource portal

This resource is for economic development professionals working in deprived places, whether as practitioners or commissioners of social purpose business support. It captures the learning from 6 distinct UK towns – Bradford, Wigan, Leicester, Grimsby, Hartlepool and Plymouth, over the 5 years of the Empowering Places programme.

Empowering Places was funded by Power to Change and managed by Co-operatives UK, with support from NEF and CLES to help start and grow community businesses. The Innovation in Business research looked at how relational, place-based business support and grass-roots networks benefitted the overall effectiveness of local support to SME’s.

Our 6 catalyst organisations, along with their partners and Local Authorities, helped shape the research and enabled rich learning about what works at the place level. We have developed an Empowering Places logic model for place-based social purpose business support, which may help you design and implement more effective support locally.

We are now sharing this learning, along with the methods used, to allow you to understand what works in areas similar to yours, and how to access resources that can help you. We have created an interactive website for you to explore our learning, through stories collected through our work and resources you may use under Creative Commons.

The website includes an interactive logic model, which you can use to assess the current and future health of the business support ecosystem in your area, in relation to the Empowering Places model. You are also invited to join our peer-support network, which will support each other to learn from and further develop and scale the model across the UK.

Literature review

This report looks at the evolution of business support to SME’s in the UK over the past 4 decades, with a focus on the 10 years since the global financial crisis

Place Based report

Findings from our action-research in each of the Empowering Places catalyst areas over the past 5 years, with practical recommendations and tools you can use

Logic Model

This sets out the elements found to have the greatest impact on the success of local business support initiatives, and can be explored further on this website

Empowering Places Logic Model

The third of our 3 reports, Innovations in Business Support, lays out a logic model which defines the elements which our research shows have the greatest impact on the success of local business support initiatives. You can download the report, along with the Literature Review and Place-based Action-learning reports, from our research section

The logic model (Click here to view) details the following elements, with examples and case studies for each which you can find in our resource section: