The Centre for Change, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CENTRIM) creates and delivers products and services that help both large and small businesses grow.
At the heart of our activities is a focus on improving the performance of business, government and social partners. We undertake research with passion, believing we can make a difference. Our underlying philosophy is ‘to close the loop’ between academe and wider society and it is underpinned by our commitment to the co-production of knowledge with a wide range of users.
This was illustrated by our achievement in the last Research and Excellence Framework exercise, where the socio-economic impact of our research was rated as the fourth best in UK with 74% of our impact cases classified as top class (4*).
Our research focuses on five main areas:
- Innovation and entrepreneurship: studying the links between SMEs and research organisations, open innovation for SMEs, the roles of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, set-up innovation coaching for executives and exploring the dynamics of knowledge sharing and learning networks.
- Organisational change and renewal: researching the shared characteristics of innovative organisations, the dynamics of project capabilities, the role of executive compensation, the demand-driven supply chains including online logistics, methods for effective change management.
- Management and innovation in finance: exploring small firms’ financing, impact of new finance systems such as crowdfunding, liquidity and market efficiency and behavioural aspects of finance in Stock Exchange, including brokers’ and clients’ behaviours.
- New forms of innovation and enterprising: identifying and investigating new forms of innovation and enterprising such as innovations in the field of humanitarian aid, ecosystems for social innovation and alternative forms of ‘unregulated’ innovation outside formal structures of R&D.
- Entrepreneurship and innovation for sustainable development: examining the international business and the effect of trade barriers, global value chains, environmental behaviour of firms and sustainable supply chains and the interaction between international trade, environmental economics and energy economics.