Study title

This project undertook two new surveys of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) across the UK to shed light on (i) the extent to which, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, SMEs have been adopting technologies or organisational practices that we might consider to be “productivity enhancing”; (ii) whether such innovation persists into the longer run; (iii) its impact on firm survival, performance, employment and worker productivity; and (iv) how government policy might promote the persistence of productivity enhancing changes into the recovery phase. This project will build the evidence base on how to best support businesses, helping to build resilience while also understanding the resulting impacts on employment and firm performance. We collaborated with the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI), building on their quarterly surveys of SMEs to include additional questions on technology adoption (and process/product innovation more generally), enablers and barriers – crucially including business views on potential policy levers. The first deliverable was a report summarising the data collected in July 2020, including analysis of heterogeneity by sector, region and firm type. Approximately 12 months after the initial survey we re-surveyed firms to understand any persistence in technological innovation beyond the immediate crisis. We also plan to track company performance via secondary datasets and changes detectible on their websites (e.g. new online offers). The second deliverable was a report summarising the findings of the second survey. We present new data from two surveys of 375 and 425 UK businesses conducted in July 2020 and July 2021 in partnership with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which seeks to understand the way in which firms have innovated in response to the pandemic. We find that the pandemic has caused enormous business disruption, which has prompted many firms to focus on innovation.This research project builds the evidence base...