Citizens UK seeks to work with member organisations to build a citizens’ agenda around local economic and industrial policy

• The Nesta study looked at innovation as applied to industrial policy and focussed on migrant micro-enterprises in Birmingham
• Experts found while there is some face-to-face business support in Birmingham, the majority of it is provided online and in English
• The Community Organising for Inclusive Industrial Policy study was conducted by Citizens UK Birmingham and the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME) at Aston Business School.

A new report by Aston University and Citizens UK Birmingham has found the UK Government must do more to include micro-enterprises with business support.

The Community Organising for Inclusive Industrial Policy study, which was conducted by Citizens UK Birmingham and the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME) at Aston Business School for Nesta, concluded micro-enterprises in principle can take advantage of business support that is available in Birmingham, but in practice there are several limitations.

Experts found while there is some face-to-face business support in Birmingham, the majority of it is provided online with most of the various government and other websites which provide extensive business support information largely in English, and not directly accessible to those who have inadequate English language skills or lack a good level of digital skills.

In Birmingham, the business leaders group successfully bid for a local authority contract to create public health videos in community languages, featuring community members in familiar locations as a way of making the content more relatable to the target audience.

Professor Monder Ram, director of Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME) at Aston Business School, said:

“It is wonderful to see CREME and Citizen UK’s highly impactful initiative on migrant business support receive this recognition from NESTA as an exemplar of ‘grassroots’ social innovation.

“Our collaboration demonstrates the value of communities working together to support businesses and tackle common challenges.”

You can read the full report HERE.