Charles P Skene Centre for Entrepreneurship





Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award

Professor Rita Marcella, Dean of Aberdeen Business School, at the 2007 Northsound Awards ceremony

Young Enterprise has been Scotland’s leading business skills programme provider for aspiring young people since 1977. It aims to give young people the opportunity to test out their business ideas and develop their own small business as a member of a dynamic team. Eighteen companies from across Scotland competed in the prestigious business event over two days. The overall winner was decided upon based on the teams’ performance in a number of areas including the quality of their business report, the quality and effectiveness of their trade stand, a “whole team” interview and finally a nerve wracking presentation in front of several hundred people.

The Northsound Awards were sponsored by George Wimpey and the Aberdeen Business School and the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards were presented at the ceremony by Professor Rita Marcella, Dean of the Business School.

Mission and Research at the Centre for Enrepreneurship

The mission of the Charles P. Skene Centre for Entrepreneurship is academic excellence in both teaching and research in entrepreneurship. We wish to inspire our students to find out about the world of entrepreneurial opportunity; we want to equip them with the knowledge, ability and understanding to build the businesses of tomorrow.

In research, we want to be a leading centre in understanding the entrepreneurial process. Teaching and research are interactive and because entrepreneurship is the leading edge of change, we need to know so that we can tell. We need to understand the how, the why and the why not questions about entrepreneurship. This is so that we can explain and appreciate the process that is changing the world about us.

The Centre was set up in 1995 to promote and research entrepreneurship. A generous endowment from our entrepreneurial benefactor, Charles Skene, in 2002 has furthered our work. Entrepreneurship is recognised as the engine of the economy. It creates jobs, new products, new process, wealth and income. The economic manifestation is businesses that are the seedbeds of entire new industries; businesses that are the nurseries of new large corporations. The social and personal manifestations are local economic development, self reliance and independence.

Entrepreneurship and small business are vitally important. Most businesses in the UK are small, some 95% of all business. Yet they provide almost half of all jobs in the UK, many new products and services and bring about change and development. We see entrepreneurship as new venture creation, but these new ventures take many forms. They can be tiny; small businesses where people simply create a satisfying job for themselves; they can be embryonic giants, growing to challenge the complacency of corporate Goliaths. Some are technically focused, bringing innovative inventions to life; others create new services to make life easier, cheaper or better. Entrepreneurship for us is a creative process which harnesses and harvests an individual’s skills, abilities and energies in a business context.


We now have an excellent team of enthusiastic and dedicated staff:

Each of us has different, but complementary skills and expertise in entrepreneurship. Together we form a great team to teach, research and promote enterprise and make a major contribution to teaching and understanding enterprise. In realising our mission we have two challenges. The first of these is building our reputation for excellent research - we achieve this by a variety of methods.

Our staff and doctoral students publishing our work in a range of international scholarly journals:-

In the last couple of years we have had substantial publication success, so that our work appears in a number of journals, books and international conference presentations.

Staff are members of the editorial boards of three leading journals.

Conferences and Other Events

Entrepreneurship Research

The Centre for Entrepreneurship is a very enthusiastic research active group with a variety of interests and expertise in entrepreneurship. We are able to offer supervision in both qualitative and quantitative approaches to entrepreneurship and welcome enquires about research proposals. Potential supervisors have research interests in two broad areas.

First the entrepreneurial process, trying to understand the big questions of how and why entrepreneurship arises and works. This might have a spatial focus, for example, entrepreneurship in China, or rural entrepreneurship. Alternatively it may be about more general issues, such as the role of gender, the role of social capital and so on. The second area is Small Business and here we are interested in particular aspects of small business. These might include such topics as training, knowledge management, governance or innovation. The focus here is on the smaller business, which we see as being different from larger businesses, but nonetheless playing a key role.

We aspire to offer an intellectually challenging but supportive collegiate atmosphere where students will realise their full potential, in terms of scholarship, publication and personal development. At present we have research students working in the areas of comparing criminality and entrepreneurship; the entrepreneurial narrative; the role of morality; the use of relationship marketing in SMEs, networking and inovation, the role of busienss support in Ghana and Chinese entrepreneurship.

Potential doctoral candidates are recommended to contact Professor Alistair R. Anderson to discuss their ideas -
Email: a.r.anderson@rgu.ac.uk

Entrepreneurship Teaching

Our second core task is the teaching of enterprise, we need to continue to inform and enthuse our students about enterprise. The Centre delivers entrepreneurship teaching to students across the University including business, engineering, maths, computing, hospitality management and design students as either core or optional elements of their courses. Within the Business School, entrepreneurship modules are core to second and third year courses and are offered as a fourth year elective module and as an elective module within the MBA programme.

Teaching includes various initiatives outwith the University, from the development and delivery of an Executive Development Programme to local SMEs, to delivering a module in entrepreneurship to local 6th year pupils at Robert Gordons College. The Centre has provided staff for various international teaching initiatives, including an International Week and teaching placement at our partner school in Clermont-Ferrand and an international entrepreneurial boot camp hosted by Strathclyde University.

Central to the teaching activity is the involvement of entrepreneurs, leading business advisors and investors in the teaching process. The Centre has built excellent contacts with the local business community and local and national entrepreneurs. The centre has helped visiting entrepreneurs to develop their teaching skills and worked with them to write their case studies so that they can deliver their cases in a classroom situation. This provides students with the opportunity to learn about the skills and techniques of entrepreneurs from many business sectors, with differing levels of success and business objectives.

Students are encouraged to further network with the local business community through participation at key external events, such as the Scottish Institute for Enterprise student Conference. A major new initiative for 2003 is the launch of a student entrepreneur club, Ignition, for students at RGU, Aberdeen University and alumni.

Contact the Centre

If you would like further information on the Centre's teaching programmes, please contact:

Heather Fulford
Centre for Entrepreneurship
The Robert Gordon University
Kaim House
Garthdee Road
Aberdeen    AB10 7QE

Tel: +44 (0)1224 263869
Email: h.fulford@rgu.ac.uk

   

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