• Project Leader: Fiona Whitehurst
• Sponsors: Entrepreneurs Forum Limited

Previous enterprise initiatives have focused on attempts to ameliorate the substantive economic and social reasons for relative 'underperformance', this project seeks to understand the less tangible, but arguably more pertinent cultural and discursive factors.  The specific research questions to be addressed are:

1)  What are the cultural and discursive factors underlying perceptions of entrepreneurship in the North East of England?

2)  What are the policy implications of those findings.

The research will be organised in 3 stages:

Stage 1 :  Survey of extant national and European data sets.

Stage 2 :  An exploratory survey of entrepreneurial intent across a range of categories of individuals in the North East of England.

Stage 3 :  Semi-structured in-depth interviews with people in each category.