I recently joined the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship (HCE) from the University of Stirling, where I was the academic lead for entrepreneurship education as well as the Academic Partnership Director for the University’s campus in Ras al Khaimah, UAE.

My doctorate work, funded by Scottish Enterprise, focused on rapidly growing ‘high growth firms’ and this remains my key area of academic interest – how some firms are able to achieve rapid growth and what we can learn from them to help other entrepreneurs, support agencies and the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem.

My work has been published in a number of leading entrepreneurship and management journals and I have undertaken research for funders including the OECD, Scottish Enterprise, the British Academy and the ESRC.

My area of expertise is broadly entrepreneurship, specifically business growth and development in the context of young ventures and SMEs. Much of my work to date has focused on high growth/scale-up entrepreneurship, including the nature and processes of growth in these firms, their support requirements (financial and otherwise) and the wider public policy context and support mechanisms designed for high growth firms/scale-ups (high growth entrepreneurship policy). I am also interested in wider issues related to business growth including the role of entrepreneurial financing; the effect of changes in ownership structure and business models; the drivers of transnational entrepreneurial migration to entrepreneurial ecosystems for accelerated growth; the development and impact of business accelerator programmes at both firm and economy levels; and firm start-up and growth ambitions amongst refugees and economic migrants.