The Green Finance Research Hub

Tackling the Early Stage Innovation Finance Gap for Small Businesses

Summary

Established within Middlesex University (MU) Business School, the GreenFin brings together a powerful coalition of leading researchers from business, management and finance disciplines, enhanced further by inter-disciplinary ties to entrepreneurial finance and sustainability across the MU faculties. Central to this are core researchers from the Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR) with a 25-year track record of outstanding research impacts in the area of SME finance, local and sustainable growth.
Highlights have included major contributions to the ESRC multi-university and practitionerbased Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), multiple government evaluations for BEIS, Innovate UK, British Business Bank, high level grant reports and high impact journal articles and leadership of major journal special issues.

Purpose

Access to finance for start-ups, SMEs, and in particular, the cleantech and health tech sectors has received prominent attention in recent times because of the environment protection agenda in the UN Sustainability Development Goals and more recent health concerns raised by the Pandemic. Clean and health tech enterprises allocate financial resources to projects that mitigate climate and health change – the embodiment of sustainability. The hub also aims to develop a University-wide research and data resource, offer research skills in green and sustainable financing, niche green finance data hub services and contribute to local economy - addressing university-society research/innovation.

Our goal is to combine high quality research and develop cutting edge insights to enhance understanding of financing processes and their impacts.

Data solutions

GreenFin provides a data hub, the first platform of its kind to allow academics access to the data for non-commercial purpose without advanced software programming knowledge. The advantage of our green financing data hub is our data processing involves rigorous stages of data retrieval such as organisation, mapping of variables, cleaning, checking and validation and sophisticated data linking. In this way we build powerful contemporary and novel data solutions.
We are therefore able to tackle key contemporary academic, policy and practitioner issues in the UK and Globally through our international research and data collaborations, overcoming current lack of suitable and compatible early-stage SME financing data.

Externally funded projects

The team is very active in working on externally funded projects and has a successful track record of delivering multiple grant and contract evaluation and scoping project reports. This has created impact in academic theory and for society through policy and practice. In addition, a number of SMEs have collaborated with the team in a variety of projects, including action-based qualitative research. Some examples of these projects are:

• Redefining Early Stage Cleantech Productivity for Low Carbon (ESRC 9 months project)
• Developing A Cleantech Investment Toolkit (MU funded 6 months project)
• CUSP Pilot Investigation of Brazil’s Sustainable Venture Finance (ESRC CUSP funded pilot project)

Who can use our data hub

Application of our data involves a wide range of users with (licensing agreement) – users may include academics, policymakers, and practitioners such as support agencies and investors. Some potential applications for our data include:

• SME finance for green innovation and sustainability
• Financial staging
• Sector studies
• SME and investor profiling
• Cross-border, international financing
• Local economic development and entrepreneurial finance ecosystems dynamics
• Network analysis of Start-ups and Seed firms
• Fintech analysis
• Financial fraud detection
• Financial and enterprise intermediary services

Managing Team

Robyn Owen, Associate Professor, CEEDR (Profile)

Suman Lodh, Senior Lecturer, Accounting & Finance (Profile)

Theresia Harrer, Research Scholar, CEEDR (Profile)

Current International University collaborators

Waikato University, New Zealand

Dublin City University, RoI

University of Angers, France

Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona