Beyond the Bottom Line: How Enterprise Drives Inclusive Growth

Beyond the Bottom Line: How Enterprise Drives Inclusive Growth Partners: • North East Enterprise Agency (NEEAL) • Durham University • Innovation Catalyst

BACKGROUND

Enterprise is vital to regional prosperity and drives economic opportunity, social inclusion, and place-based resilience across the North East of England. Yet its value is often narrowly defined by business growth, job creation, and economic output. While these metrics matter, they overlook the wider contributions enterprise makes: fostering resilience, building skills, enabling personal agency, and strengthening communities. INE, in partnership with Durham University, the North East Enterprise Agency, and Innovation Catalyst, set out to capture the full value of enterprise to the region’s development.

WHAT WE DID

INE led a multi-method research programme conducted between July and September 2025, drawing on a review of existing academic literature on enterprise, entrepreneurship, and business support; in-depth interviews with regional experts, entrepreneurs, and enterprise support practitioners; case studies and evaluations from enterprise support providers across the region; and a collaborative workshop held in July 2025. INE also convened a public event on 9 October with NEEAL, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to share new research findings and discuss how to build a thriving regional economy that works for everyone.

Key activities and outputs

A new diffusion model for understanding and evaluating enterprise value in the North East, which captures contributions across individual, business, and societal levels, recognising that enterprise value diffuses outward through interconnected levels beyond traditional economic outputs

Six alternative lenses through which the local value of enterprise can be understood: community and place-based growth; growth as survival; growth through opportunity; skills and workforce development; foundational growth; and sustainable growth

A new framework for measuring enterprise value that reflects the realities of the North East economy and the goals of inclusive, place-based growth - moving beyond turnover, productivity, and high-growth firm prevalence

Actionable implications for regional enterprise support, including the need to move beyond stop-start funding cycles, address structural barriers, balance scale and flexibility, and deliver targeted and bespoke interventions for underrepresented groups and communities

The public event featured a panel of entrepreneurs sharing their varied motivations for starting businesses, which primarily focused on the social value they could create and prompted deeper consideration of what constitutes "successful" entrepreneurship when viewed through the lens of inclusive growth

The event represented an opportunity to develop a distinctly North East approach to policymaking that truly addresses the region's needs and builds new kinds of opportunities for the future of enterprise in the region

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