Dr Inge Hill

Professional biography

My research focuses on entrepreneurship and entrepreneuring as drivers of local/regional development and social innovation. Using mainly qualitative methods and conceptual approaches, I’ve studied the social and economic aspects of entrepreneurial processes and SMEs in urban and rural contexts aimed to inform policymakers for improving living well in a sustainable society. Throughout my research I have combined theories from diverse areas of research including entrepreneurship, organisational studies, and human geography. I am particularly interested in applying a practice theory lens, and investigating how entrepreneurial practices are accomplished.

I served as associate editor at SN Business and Economics for two years, and am currently serving on the editorial review board of International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research for several years. I also regularly review for the Scandinavian Journal of Management, Cultural Trends, European Journal of Management, amongst others. I am a member of the prestigious Peer Review College of the British Academy of Management.  

My current research activities are applied to two main areas:

I focus on the conceptions of space and place as important elements of entrepreneurially driven regional development to inform policymaking and community development on how to support living well in local places, for example via #place-based #business support. Under Tacking inequalities in rural areas and changing the discourse of 'deficit rural' I research how to #level up the socio-economic inequalities between urban and rural areas, holding an Open University Challenge build-it grant.

Business advice/support research for sustainable business development, achieving NetZero and shaping enterprise / SME policy. Here I currently research how urban and rural businesses (excluding land-based ones, e.g. farming, forestry) can be supported more effectively for creating positive regional development that ensures sustainable societies/communities that can live well in their chosen location, creating liveable places. In particular, I won funding in 2024 for researching how to improve business support for first-time innovators amongst rural SMEs in Scotland.

My research focusing on the role of business advisers in advice processes gained the award 'highly commended' at the 2023 British Academy of Management conference @Sussex University (with Kevin Mole, Warwick University Business School, Enterprise Research Centre).

Creative industries entrepreneurship, and how it is accomplished. Here I am currently working on how entrepreneuring - the enactment of entrepreneurial practices in situ - is shaped by and shapes contexts. I am particularly interested in the role of creative hubs and creative clusters for local economic and social development to level up communities - in rural and urban contexts, allowing local people and communities to live well in their chosen places and earn a living in sustainable ways. I investigate micro-exchange processes of creative entrepreneuring, with focus on craft entrepreneuring. I am interested in how creative entrepreneuring is accomplished. 

I currently hold funding from the Institute of Small Business and Enterprise to research how socio-spatial context matters for designing and delivering business support to rural craft entrepreneurs in England and Wales and how we can improve the business support provision.

I founded our first rural enterprise research group, now the research cluster Rural Economy I am the director of, with members from across the university. We research rural small businesses and their business support needs, with one project on innovation support for first-time innovators.

PhD supervision: I have two PhD completions and am open to PhD applications in the above research areas. I have examined PhDs as an external, most significantly at Toulouse Management School, France. I am open to external roles as PhD examiner.

Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership - Pathway lead "Organisation, Governance and Leadership": I manage our pathway with fully funded PhD-studentships and postdoctoral Fellowships. Get in touch if you would like to learn more.

I am a passionate entrepreneurship educator with 20 years of teaching experience and am committed to mainstreaming entrepreneurial learning into university education across disciplines. Fellow passionate educators call me one of the trailblazers for enterprise education. I am internationally accredited EntreComp Champion that influences policy and practice. 

I hold a Master's in Education and Senior Fellowship with AdvanceHE/HEA; I am proud to be a certified management and business educator. I am humbled to have been awarded the honoroable award as EntreComp champion for my commitment to mainstream the entrepreneurial competences of the EU competence framework into all enterprise education, one of the few in the UK, influencing policy making. I do this for and in Business Schools and beyond through my role as Director of Enterprise Educators UK and Assessor for the Small Business Charter. I was one of the first EE-UK Fellows demonstrating my commitment to have my teaching-related experiences accredited and co-developed this great accreditation https://www.enterprise.ac.uk/fellows/eeuk-fellows/.

My sole-authored textbook Start Up. A practice based guide to new venture creation was the first to address the challenges social enterprises face in every chapter (Hill, 2015). 

I have taught all degree levels from Certificate to MBA and senior managers' CPD on new venture creation, SME growth and exit, entrepreneurship, CSR and sustainable business strategies. Over the last three years I have finetuned approaches for integrating teaching on and for the Sustainable Development Goals and NetZero in degrees and all my modules and on reducing carbon emissions (See Hill and Scott, 2020) and I am a proud full member of Catalyst2030, a collaboration to achieve the SDG's by 2030. I am on the OU ESD changer makers working with students to develop a strategic approach for the Faculty of Law, Business and Social Sciences to mainstream SDGs into ongoing and future degrees.

I have significant experiences in teaching management and leadership, including course director of a Master's I co-created, leading revalidations, desiging modules and degrees from scratch, departmental quality lead and employability lead for a Business School Department.

To inform the public and members, as one of the Directors of Enterprise Educators UK (EE-UK), I regularly publish a blog, see a recent one on social enterprise https://www.enterprise.ac.uk/remember_social_ents/. Other blogs address sustainability education, women's entrepreneurship and reflection as an educator.

My current teaching interests focus on new venture creation and SME development, with a focus on sustainable and responsible ways of 'doing business', from the pre-start-up phase onwards. I am committed to mainstreaming social enterprise education into all curricula across all disciplines, so that learners may have more choices later on when considering to start a new enterprise. For this purpose I wrote and published case studies (see Hill and Scott, 2020).

I am currently involved in production for B209, replacing B205, BB851 and a micro-credential on leadership and management, BZFM303, for which I am educational lead in the autumn term.

I am committed to creating knowledge relevant to policy makers and entrepreneurs on how to create and maintain sustainable ways of 'doing business'. I am a frequently invited speaker on SME development and business support. For example, in 2021, I was invited to discuss 'Education for start-ups' by the Westminster Business Forum in London. In early 2024 a POSTnote 'Green skills in education and employment' I reviewed and contributed to cited my teaching blog on teaching on sustainability development goals.

To create more sustainable societies in which we can all live well, I am committed to support social enterprises to make an even bigger difference. To achieve this personal amibition, I have been a non-executive director with several social enterprises in the UK since 2010 and integrate insights on and for social enterprise into teaching and teaching related publications. I have been part of the movement to integrate social value creation into procurement with Social Value UK as part of their advisory Council.

In addition to my research activities, I enjoy serving our researcher communities and engage with the learned society British Academy of Management, leading a conference track and serving on our Council. Here I lead on the development programme for early career researchers transitioning to mid-career.

National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE)

Having been a co-investigator with this exciting Research England funded research project on rural enterprise in the previous job role, I am now an Associate Fellow. I was co-lead on the rural creative industry research stream https://nicre.co.uk/about-us/our-people/. For reports and journal outputs on rural enterprise please see the list of publications.

KULT - rural creative industries in Germany research project

I was invited to be part of the steering group for an exciting project on rural creative industries in Germany, https://www.thuenen.de/de/fachinstitute/laendliche-raeume/innovation-und-wertschoepfung-in-laendlichen-raeumen/projekte/kunst-und-kulturschaffende-als-ressource-der-laendlichen-entwicklung 2023-2025.

Catalyst2030

Full member of Catalyst2030 collaborating on raising the visibility of social enterprises and the social economy and to achieve the SDG targets.