Category Archives: Business and Law

Gender, Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Similarity and difference

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This post was contributed by members of the Transforming Institutions by Gendering contents and Gaining Equality in Research (TRIGGER) team – a research project in Birkbeck’s Department of Management – following a ‘Gender, Entrepreneurship and Innovation’ networking event at the Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE) at Lund University, Sweden., Monday, November 30

TRIGGER - CIRCLE event. (Photo courtesy of Lucinda David)

TRIGGER – CIRCLE event. (Photo courtesy of Lucinda David)

This international panel was made up of people with differing expertise in gender, entrepreneurship and innovation. It included academics whose roles are to support female entrepreneurship, those who have first-hand experience of supporting the gender equality process in the university setting, those whose roles had been to fund gender sensitive research and those who research gender differences.

The mixture of experience led to interesting perspectives and insights on women’s attitudes towards entrepreneurship and career development more generally. A key theme raised by Henry Etzkowitz was similarity and/or difference:

Under what conditions do women want similarity or want differences from men in the way they are perceived and supported?

The panellists were:

  • Professor Asa Lindholm Dahlstrand, Circle (Lund University) and expert on entrepreneurship
  • Professor Helen Lawton Smith, TRIGGER project, Birkbeck
    Professor Carin Holmquist, Stockholm School of Economics (SSE): first chairwoman of the SSE Business Lab
  • Professor Per Eriksson, Lund University, former head of Vinnova, now Lund University
  • Helena Ljusberg, Senior Business Developer, Lund University Innovation Support System
  • Dr Cristina Glad, Former Executive VP, BioInvent International AB
  • Dr Linnea Taylor, WINGS (Women In Great Sciences), Lund University
  • Professor Henry Etzkowitz, Stanford University & Birkbeck, Author of Athena Unbound

Differences are not in people, but in structures

On similarity and the issue of perception of what women entrepreneurs do, Carin Holmquist forcibly made the point that women are driving business as much as men. She argued that there is no difference between male/female entrepreneurs. It is time to stop making assumptions about the peculiarities / needs of women entrepreneurs: differences are not in people, but in structures. She cited Tiger Woods, “I am the human race”. However, there is a tendency to disadvantage women as role models. Often when thinking of an entrepreneur, male entrepreneur figures, such as Bill Gates or Richard Branson come up. Even though women do not set up big hi-tech giant companies, they set up other types of business, which are not often seen as “innovation”. Successful entrepreneurship is what creates value and/or employment regardless of whether “technical” or “soft”.

Women and men are similarly gifted at identifying markets and handling customers. The issue is not about including women in, but more about accepting women’s ideas. Nowadays, as Cristina Gad pointed out, there are many more role models, both male and female, and very good activities for researchers who want to become entrepreneurs as well as mentoring programmes on commercialisation of research. For example at Lund, Helena Ljusburg told about a support programme on entrepreneurship called “Innovation Toolbox”. It is a network of organisations to support innovation including a laboratory incubator. But it is important how women define themselves (for example as an engineer, or as a woman engineer?)

Differences in career development

All is not easy, however. On differences in how women approach career development, it was agreed that women and men behave differently when applying for a job or for promotion. Men can be much more pushy while women are more afraid to step up. Inequality is reinforced where there is a bias in various committees, especially funding bodies, where men sit on the board and look at the process. There are obvious different outcomes of processes if more women are involved in the promotion committees.

Women are also disadvantaged in their careers by differences in perception about maternity leave. Linnea Taylor finds that men are celebrated as a role model if taking up paternity leave but it is expected that a woman will take up 100% maternity leave. Carin Holmquist argued that a main reason for women in founding a company is to combine work and family. There is a danger of the discourse about women and men being equal and the same where there are different cultural and practical circumstances. But women can do more to help themselves. Helena Ljusberg who supports women entrepreneurs said that it is important for female founders to learn leadership skills, and how to delegate tasks to others.

For Per Eriksson the main lesson learned in supporting the careers of other people is that you tend to help people you like and that look like you. He started a gender pilot at Vinnova. He also appointed a woman as a deputy and he termed it as “job marriage”. For him it was a huge learning experience because of the opportunity to learn from the difference and complementarity between male/female.

Gender paradox

In Sweden as elsewhere, inequality encountered by female immigrants is an issue of difference. Even for well-qualified ones, female immigrants generally have far fewer career opportunities: as shown by Eurostat data, the female foreigner is less likely to have access to social networks.

From the discussion it seems as if there is a “gender paradox”. Many speakers mentioned the importance of networking with the like-minded female while others mentioned about complementarity (working with males). The answer to the question of under what conditions do women want similarity and under what conditions women want difference is “it depends”. If it is access to money, then the answer is working with a man. It is usually men that are the brokers of finance. However, Henry Etzkowitz argued, it is vital to recognise that the informal channels or social networks should be gender blind. Access to informal connections helps regardless of gender.

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This article was written on Wednesday, 7 December by Helen Lawton Smith, Ning Baines, Viviana Meschitti, Asa Lindholm Dahlstrand

How the dressing room helps decide success or failure in UK football

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This post was contributed by Nick Eisen, Business Engagement Reporter, Birkbeck School of Business, Economics and Informatics

How the dressing room helps decide success or failure in UK footballBritish football’s dressing room culture, and its role in the success or failure of teams and players, was the focus of an intriguing seminar organised by Birkbeck’s Sport Business Centre (SBC) at the British Medical Association on Monday 9 November.

During the seminar, titled Professional Football in the UK: The Beautifully Ugly Game, the speaker, Dr Seamus Kelly of University College Dublin, discussed his research, including interviews with players, agents and managers.

Here he found an emphasis on physical attributes over thinking skills potentially inhibited teams and also players – on and beyond the pitch. Including critical thinking skills in training could help address this.

Competitive atmosphere

Introducing the evening, SBC Director Sean Hamil noted Dr Kelly’s particular qualifications for his subject. Informing his academic perspective, as a former professional footballer Dr Kelly had earned an entry to the largely closed world of the dressing room.

That world’s positive aspects might include the social interactions of its competitive atmosphere, which, while potentially quite brutal, could psychologically prepare some players for the stresses associated with matches.

However, Dr Kelly also found bravado, indulgence and ostentation masking debilitating fears of failure to play well. Constructive competition could encourage skills development; destructive competition could undermine that. Behind apparent team camaraderie, intense rivalry for places in a squad could lead players to attack each other’s confidence and prospects through behaviour such as abusive or aggressive criticism or humour.

Developing strategies

One way (already practiced at some clubs) to help counter such behaviour could be to get players to work together in training, among themselves, to develop possible strategies to given game scenarios, encouraging player engagement, thinking skills and cooperation, which might in turn help players act more strategically in and beyond football.

Clubs could also further develop approaches that included analyses of personality as well as physical ability in player selections, acquisitions and introductions to squads.

Research into thinking skills is already happening. Since 1999 Birkbeck has worked in this and related fields with organisations such as UEFA.

Sean Hamil also pointed out that other sectors had accepted much of this thinking for decades: why was UK football different? In response, Dr Kelly noted the game’s resistance to change.

Development was perhaps therefore about nuance: consultation rather than confrontation, addressing obstacles such as short-termism and about fresh thinking on introducing approaches established elsewhere to a hitherto largely resistant arena, recognising its positive aspects.

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Birkbeck’s Sport Business Centre can offer consultancy on short, medium and long term projects. Please contact the Business Engagement team to discuss or see our ‘Find an Expert’ database.

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Sport Business Centre public seminar considers value of strategic thinking

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This post was contributed by Nick Eisen, Business Engagement Reporter, Birkbeck School of Business, Economics and Informatics

Image courtesy of Andy Watson-Smith under CC via Flickr.com

Sport can play an important role in the UK’s health and prosperity. To fulfil that role the many different elements of UK sport must find a strategy around which to unite – and through which to engage individuals and organisations at all levels, local, national and international.

This message emerged in a public seminar organised by the Sport Business Centre in Birkbeck’s School of Business, Economics and Informatics.

Entitled public Affairs in Sport and Business: How to Influence the Influencers, the seminar took place on Monday 26 October at the British Medical Association (BMA) in Tavistock Square.

The evening was a forum for panellists and audience, including prominent representatives from various sports, to debate a subject given added urgency by the impending government spending review on 25 November, when cuts in many areas are likely, emphasising the challenge the sports community faces in communicating and gaining support to enable the contributions sports can make to society.

The event also demonstrated the Sport Business Centre’s role as a hub and meeting point for academics, students, industry professionals, members of the public and others, where they can discuss and develop ideas, initiatives and ongoing working relationships.

On the panel were:

What is public affairs?

The session began with a definition of terms (from Ben Andersen-Tuffnell). Public affairs were seen as the management of an organisation’s interaction with stakeholders, particularly regarding reputation or policy goals, which can set a tone for debates that may decide legislation the organisation must navigate if it is to prosper.

An effective public affairs strategy requires careful planning: identifying stakeholders, many of which may have conflicting interests, from local and regional to national and international levels; considering the influences upon and of each stakeholder (the loudest voices are not always the most influential); and tailoring bottom-up and top-down approaches to suit different circumstances and communicate the message.

That message has to be well prepared for different audiences, succinct, with clear aims and vision, and based on evidence. In turn, the process of communication has to be similarly well-planned and responsive to circumstances.

Tactics versus strategy

When the seminar considered this outline in terms of sport, the sector was seen to have prioritised tactics over strategy, short-term survival over long-term goals, one possible reason being the comparative difficulty in measuring the return on investment of a public affairs strategy with a 20 or 30-year view, the benefits of which might be easier to acknowledge than to quantify.

In pursuit of that longer-term view, an observation from the floor found support for the idea that sport could look to the House of Lords, recognised as a valuable source of expertise and experience (such as that of Paralympic Champion Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson or of Olympic Champion and Ambassador, Olympic Legacy, Lord Sebastian Coe), where the status of members has allowed debates to take longer-term perspectives and to offer more space for alternative views, less wedded to party politics and the short-term funding cycles of governments and the House of Commons.

Baroness Grey-Thompson and Lord Coe are just two of UK sport’s powerful supporters; and the seminar noted the sector’s considerable assets, in the form of celebrated, popular events and individuals, to help promote an overall strategy – even more important now, with fundamental change to sports funding expected after November’s government review and with the Rio Olympics in 2016.

To implement such a strategic goal the need was to emphasise the value of sport in promoting physical, emotional, intellectual, social, environmental and economic wellbeing via widespread participation in activities that could help provide positive alternatives to antisocial behaviour and nurture happier, healthier individuals. The positive profile of elite sport could be used to help increase such participation. The emphasis was therefore on top-level sporting excellence as a means to an end rather than end in itself.

Looking beyond the DCMS

Given that vision of sport as contributing to various aspects of health, the sector could focus on its relevance to many different areas apart from the obvious ones, and on establishing relationships with government departments other than the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), important though that is. The Department of Education is one of those other departments, with 80% of Sports Leaders UK’s remit focusing on working with schools and colleges, including helping young people use sport to develop leadership skills that can then be applied in work and other areas.

Another cited example was the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as the sports-related concept of active travel such as walking or cycling could be jointly promoted as reducing pollution from cars or buses and benefiting the environment as well as individuals’ health; and that link between appropriate sporting activity and health immediately suggests joint initiatives with the Department of Health and the NHS.

In terms of specific schemes, the role of Manchester City and its Etihad Campus project in regenerating a large area of Manchester was cited (by Dominic Goggins) as another example of sport’s wider social role. The regeneration is in turn set to reward the football club, with new links to local organisations and even China, following the inclusion of the campus on the Chinese itinerary for the country’s recent state visit.

State of play

While Etihad showed what could be achieved, it was also seen to exemplify the prominence of individual projects compared with an absence of an overall sports strategy, with projects existing in “silos” rather as part of a coordinated whole. Individual groups might have strategies, but not sport as one sector.

The seminar debated that, in this respect, sport differed from the arts, to which it looks by way of comparison, because sports bodies have not had to combine their efforts before, (funding changes are likely to alter this), and because it has only become professional recently, relative to sectors such as the arts.

So if there was a national sports strategy, what might it look like? The seminar debated that the strategic goal could be to help make Britain the most physically active nation in the world by 2020-2025. In this, members of the panel noted that the Sport and Recreation Alliance, the umbrella body for the national governing bodies of sport, might be able to play a more strategic role.

However, the feeling was that to embark on this would require a shift towards strategic thinking that may have started but still has a long way to go, that this start has come too late to be effective in the coming spending review, and that political support for such a strategy is currently low.

The UK’s gap between sporting vision and implementation was seen as significant and there was an observed need to learn from missed opportunities. In this context, while London 2012 was seen to show what coordination across many groups over a clear strategy could achieve, that success was partial.

For example, could the 500,000 people who had signed up in 2005 as volunteers for London 2012 have been given more training and involvement in sport in those seven years pre-2012, especially given UK sport’s reliance on volunteers?

Also related to 2012, an audience member remarked that the Olympic pool in Stratford was expensive to use and largely empty, with a school having to fundraise to pay for slots, rather than gaining central support and encouragement to use the pool.

Opportunities and challenges

The panellists’ presentations and subsequent question-and-answer session moved at a rapid pace, covering a great deal of ground in the allotted time and providing an initial platform for thought-provoking ideas.

The fact that the distinguished headquarters of the BMA was the venue for this Sport Business Centre event reflected the role of sport in promoting health and the grounds for cooperation between different bodies in promoting sport.

Overall, there was a sense that Britain’s sporting achievements offer inspiring opportunities to promote public health, and that the country faces considerable challenges in creating an environment to grasp those opportunities.

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Why Should Britain keep its Human Rights Act?

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This post was contributed by Devin Frank Law (LLM) graduate. Devin attended Bianca Jagger’s speech at the School of Law’s annual Patrick McAuslan Lecture on Friday, November 6  

Bianca Jagger

Bianca Jagger

We all see the signs in the tube, listen to the debates in the evening news and read the contrasting opinions in the Daily Mail and The Guardian.

Should David Cameron’s majority government scrap the Human Rights Act? Should they lead us out of the Convention of Europe? Should the UK exit the European Union?

On Friday 6 November 2015 long-time human rights activist and the Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador Bianca Jagger spoke at Birkbeck to give an enlightened and informative perspective on the UK’s current human rights debate.

While Bianca’s talk did indeed have the emotion, humour and flair one might expect from a human rights rockstar (figuratively speaking) — her talk was also a well-researched and academically sound historical analysis of how Britain developed its long standing and legally robust human rights tradition.

From Magna Carta to migrant crisis

Bianca began her talk by reminding us that Britain was not always a democracy governed by the rule of law. For most of its existence England had a Monarch who answered neither to Parliament nor the people and governed with absolute authority. In the year 1215 this began to change when King John bound himself to the Magna Carta; however, and as Bianca persuasively argued, the principles emanating out of the Magna Carta took 800 years to root themselves in law culminating with the 1998 Act of Parliament — the Human Rights Act.

We were also reminded throughout Bianca’s talk that 730 years after the Magna Carta the people of Europe endured the worst abuse of authority and government power in the continent’s history. In the context of the current debate – should the UK leave the council of Europe – Bianca reminded us that following the horrors of the Second World War, the general consensus of ‘never again’ UK authorities led the way in drafting and establishing the 1950 European Convention of Human Rights.

In the context of the current migration crisis Bianca did state that 65 years after the ratification of the European convention of Human Rights, it’s odd and indeed counterintuitive that in the midst of yet another humanitarian catastrophe, British Politicians are looking to reduce and take away the rights of the people.

One might argue that British politicians are simply looking for political ways to reduce their moral, ethical and legal responsibilities; however, and through her talk, Bianca argued that ‘our’ human rights are the result of hard fought battles and elements of British Society that we the people must defend.

A weak UK Human Rights Act

Bianca JaggerThe underlining message and golden thread of Bianca’s talk was that human rights belong to the people and are there to protect the people. Everyday otherwise normal people rely on their human rights in housing and employment tribunals, in cases against their local councils and in situations where individual police officers attempt to overstep their authority. An important example is the relationship between our democratic duties as citizens and our right to protest when we feel that our political representatives have led us astray.

In closing this blog, I will attempt to leave you with a rather simplistic observation. Bianca’s argument is that we need our human rights and any attempt to weaken our legal rights is an attack on the society we have spent 800 years building.

However, I would point out the Britain’s Human Right’s legal framework is already weak. Compared to other similar countries, Germany or Canada for example, the UK’s Human Right’s Act is incapable of declaring a government decision or policy unconstitutional. If Parliament is truly intent on ignoring human rights, they can.

Perhaps than, what should be taken from Bianca’s talk and this simple observation is that it is as important now as ever before to not only defend the human rights that we do have, but to continue to build a society based on the rule of law and the individual rights of citizens i.e the battle has been hard fought but there is still work to be done.

The message should therefore be that instead of taking three steps backwards and abolishing the Human Rights Act, we should be taking five steps forward and not only protecting the Human Rights Act but actively working to strengthen it so as to ensure that our rights are truly and genuinely protected.

View the Patrick McAuslan lecture 2015 below:

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