Blogs

Welcome to the Rural Economy Cluster blogpage! My name is Inge Hill, PhD, I founded the cluster and am its first director. I am delighted to see you are interested in finding out more about what we do.

mail boxes on road

As cluster director, I bring together the OU research community investigating phenomena in rural areas from across the OU. So far, we have members from FASS, STEM and FBL.

As a ‘city girl’ I turned to researching businesses in rural areas, as a lot of the existing research is often implicitly only relevant for firms located in urban areas. To my initial great surprise, many existing research publications do not make explicit their urban data collection. Hence, we rural researchers have identified the need for more nuanced research on the needs of rural people and the economy, beyond land-based businesses (agriculture, fishery, forestry). The latter only constitute 15% in 2022 of all business units based in rural areas. Small and micro-businesses in rural areas constitute the large majority of the business units, with very few large firms located in rural areas.

Our research informs the ‘levelling-up’ policy agenda, as a lot of our research has policy implications for the UK, and beyond. Supported by a management team and working with deputy director Liz Moody, we thrive on the initial support and interest we gained internally at the OU and externally in the UK and Europe. Why not check out our ‘Research’ page?

My personal passion and one research area lies in supporting rural firms with business advice. Why not check out this well-received review on the academic literature? (Hill and Mole, 2022)

We run a research seminar series with internal and external speakers, opened by a German research partner of mine, Dr Tuitjen, and continued with a presentation on my own research on supporting rural firms on May 7, 2024. Check out the list of upcoming research presentations here.

We hold several externally funding projects, including a HORIZON project and a small grant from the Institute of Small Business and Enterprise.

We look to extend our external partner networks and are keen to hear from you in the UK and beyond.

Email me on inge.hill@open.ac.uk. I look forward to hearing from you.