Management School wins prestigious Small Business Charter Award

Management School Business Development Manager, Anne Donnelly and Director, Professor Murray Dalziel outside 10 Downing Street

The University of Liverpool’s Management School is celebrating being awarded the Small Business Charter Silver Award in recognition of its role helping to kick-start British enterprise. 

The Small Business Charter Award scheme – of which the Management School is a trailblazer member – has already helped 4,700 students to find work placements in Britain’s exciting micro-business and start-up sector.

Small Business Charter organisations have directly helped over 8,000 small businesses – working with them through workshops, mentoring and other business support.  Over 800 new businesses have already been started as a result of Small Business Charter members.

Exceptional dedication

By receiving the award, the Management School has demonstrated exceptional dedication to helping improve links with, and support the small business community, in the local area.

Examples of this include the Growth Catalyst programme and the Collaborate to Innovate (C2i) project .

Growth Catalyst helps local owner-managers to grow their business through dedicated business enhancing activities.  The C2i project provides assistance to SMEs in region in partnership with Agile Business Solutions. The basic premise of the C2i is that innovation is best performed in a co-operative mode with other organisations.

The Management School was presented with its Small Business Charter Award at a ceremony that took place at 10 Downing Street.  Lord Young, an adviser to the Prime Minister on small business and enterprise, and Sir Peter Bonfield, chair of The Small Business Charter Management Board and former chairman of BT, presented the awards.

Congratulating the Small Business Charter award-winners for their work, Lord Young  said: “The recipients of this award have all demonstrated exceptional dedication to improving links with and supporting small businesses in their local area, already creating over 800 jobs.

“Our world-class universities and business schools are a key part of the UK economy – even more so as a result of this initiative.

“I hope that these awards will be the first of many and build on the outstanding work our business schools do to boost enterprise locally.”

Professor Murray Dalziel, Director of the Management School, commented: “The Management School’s mission is ‘learning to make a difference’.  This award recognises the work we are doing with SMEs on Merseyside and we look forward to doing even more.”

Significant benefits

The Small Business Charter Award brings significant benefits – it means that the Management School will have the ability to play an active role in schemes such as Growth Vouchers, Growth Accelerators and Start-Up Loans provided by the Government – meaning they can directly invest in new start-ups and entrepreneurs.

The Small Business Charter originated following Lord Young’s report ‘Growing Your Business’, which was aimed at bringing business schools, business and entrepreneurs closer together to deliver real change.

Supported by the Association of Business Schools, Lord Young and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills the Small Business Charter Awards offers a springboard to unlocking support and investment for students, start-ups and small businesses.

The Charter also follows the Association of Business Schools’ Innovation Taskforce report.