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The paper questions aspects of the UK government’s policy to target small firm support on fast‐growing firms – to maximise its employment impact. The paper explores the tension between advice likely to increase growth and risk‐taking and advice likely to ensure firm survival in the turbulent small and medium‐sized enterprises sector. The research data derive from 24 semi‐structured interviews and a group interview of ten business advisers in the West Midlands region collected between autumn 1996 and spring 1997, and a national survey of 175 Business Link personal business advisers (PBAs) conducted in April 1998. Interviewees responded to a prompt asking for advice to a fast‐growing firm. The paper compares qualitative interview responses from a wide variety of West Midlands business advisers with questionnaire responses from PBAs. The paper suggests that the advice given by accountants and bank managers differs little from that given by Business Link’s PBAs. The paper will argue that advisers including PBAs, offer risk‐averse advice and support to small firms. Present business advice might reduce insolvency rather than increase the number of fast‐growth firms. The risk‐averse nature of advice, reflecting the adviser’s clientele, undermines policies designed to increase the number of fast‐growth companies. It concludes that advice will often be inconsistent with the growth‐oriented aim of government policy.

This paper aims to consider the methods used by publicly supported business advisers to assess their client businesses. These business advisers are increasingly required to diagnose the problem or opportunities that face their clients before recommending types of business support.

The study reports semi‐structured interviews with 39 business advisers, from accountants to publicly funded Business Link business advisers.

The study suggests that one of the key to understanding the way in which advisers assess businesses is through congruence, that is does the business reflect the aims and objectives of the management in its operations and processes. Failure to be congruent can deliver error messages to advisers that suggest a problem diagnosis.

Business advice is shown to be a process that involves judgemental decision making. In turn, this may enable advisers to focus on solutions to these identified problems.

This paper builds on a significant gap in the extant knowledge on the processes of making diagnosis of business problems in a holistic manner.

UK Business Link provides bespoke advice to small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) through business advisers. The Small Business Service’s consultation paper, “Integrating the business support infrastructure for SMEs”, advocated “customer‐driven, not supply‐led” publicly funded business support, where personal business advisers (PBA) signpost the company to advice. Advisers must assess their client’s needs using their business experience, which results in the advisers developing heuristics (or “rules‐of‐thumb”) to understand the essential components of the flourishing firm. The paper contends that an inductive methodology can uncover advisers’ heuristics, developed to derive a practical “model” of success. In total, 29 business advisers participated in individual semi‐structured interviews and a focus group of ten public sector business advisers provided a qualitative element of the research. The model borrows concepts from systems theory to conceptually represent how practical business advisers view the world of the small firm manager. This suggests that there is a tension between the focus of business advisers on a “closed” system of management, whereas owner‐managers concentrate on a more concrete open system of sales, cash and production.

The growth in popularity of the regional innovation system approach has, in part, been driven by the need for economies to respond to the after shocks of the global financial crisis. At the same time, the author sees the term anchor institutions are used increasingly to describe organisations that have an important presence in the local community and make some strategic contribution to the local economy. The purpose of this paper is to consider the needs of the micro and small business (MSB) ecosystem through the lens of the entrepreneurial university as a regional anchor institution.

Asheim et al. (2011) refers to regional innovation systems as, an emphasis on economic and social interaction between agents, spanning the public and private sectors to engender and diffuse innovation within regions embedded in wider national and global systems. According to Doloreux and Parto (2005) three dimensions underpin the use of the regional innovation systems concept, namely: the interactions between different actors in the innovation process, the role of institutions and the use of regional systems analysis to inform policy decisions. The author has drawn on contemporary literature on the entrepreneurial university, regional systems of innovation and institutions to explore some key qualities and problems around anchor Institutions, networks and national and local policy.

Following the Chancellor’s Comprehensive Spending Review in November 2015 and post the changes in the Department of Business Innovation and Skills remit the author wants to highlight the way universities can take a lead role as an anchor institution within their region. The author argues that this role should include providing a wider range of formal and informal support, knowledge and resource for MSBs, alongside the usual SME suspects (Hart and Anyadike-Danes, 2014; Witty, 2013; Wilson, 2012). Based on my analysis and involvement in the the work of the eight Entrepreneurial Universities of the Year Award winners – during the author’s time as President of ISBE – He suggested four different ways in which collaboration might be enhanced to ensure MSBs make maximum use of the advice and support on offer from universities playing this anchor role.

The results emerging from this work suggest a need for regional policy makers to embrace a innovation-supportive culture, which actually enables firms and systems to evolve over time would be far more effective than those proposed in the latest Comprehensive Spending Review. The outcomes of which will see some of the most robustly evaluated programmes, designed to support small firm growth, closed down and replaced by a commitment (by government) to secure a strong, growing economy, cutting of more red tape and extending small business rate relief for an extra year (Mole, 2015).

Focuses on exploring the extent and patterns of innovation in the West Midlands region, based primarily on data generated by the Price Waterhouse West Midlands Business Survey, a bi‐annual survey of around 1,000 businesses. Explores regional development and innovation within a framework developed by Camagni, which focuses on agglomeration economies and the creation of an innovative milieu within a regional economy. Suggests two methods to encourage innovation within the UK’s West Midlands region through support to associated expenditures (training and exporting). In the context of a rising currency the research suggests that innovating firms have a strategy to overcome adverse currency movements.