Enterprise Education; SME Business start-up; Rural aspects of Entrepreneurship; Business networking and clustering.

In particular the impact of Entrepreneurship Education (EE) evaluating the impact from the viewpoint of three separate but overlapping perspectives; i.e. Receivers of EE,(students); Providers (HE Institutions) and Drivers,( Stakeholders and Policy Makers).

The study will ascertain where there may be full consensus, partial consensus and no consensus of the impact. The study will focus on the impact in SW Scotland where the political drive to retain talent within the region and encourage people to start up and grow new businesses was a driver for the BA Applied Enterprise programme.

Areas of expertise include;

Enterprise Education; Enterprise Development; Business Management and Organisation; Accounting and Finance.

I am currently working closely with colleagues from the local authority Education Department  in Dumfries and Galloway on the da Vinci project involving 9 secondary schools. The intention is to provide personal development and support to lead teachers in enterprise creativity and ideation for future collaboration events.

I am also working with colleagues  to establish a UWS research community on the Dumfries campus. Currently there is a Collaborative and Knowledge Exchange (C.A.K.E) group which includes colleagues from across several academic disciplines.

The group meets throughout the academic year to identify collaborative themes for working papers.