Current Students and Staff

// University News

18 Mar 2019

Dr Kun Fu wins prestigious British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant

Headshot of Dr Kun Fu with purple background

Dr Kun Fu, Lecturer and Programme Director of MSc Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management at Loughborough London, has won a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.

The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant is one of the Academy’s highest profile and competitive programmes, offered jointly through the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust to support primary research in the humanities and social sciences.

The funded research project “Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Innovation-orientated Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economy: A Study of “Xiong’an” New Area in China”, will explore how regions in emerging economies develop entrepreneurship ecosystems that enable new ventures to engage in innovative activities.

The research will advance the understanding of the enabling mechanisms of entrepreneurship and provide a targeted approach to facilitating start-up and scale-up of entrepreneurial and innovative businesses through building regional entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This targeted approach is in direct contrast to most existing business and policy initiatives which have long been built around co-location and purported location advantages, omitting the vital importance of the new ventures’ own behaviours in generating a vibrant ecosystem and creating value that drives growth.

The research findings will enable policymakers to recognise idiosyncratic developmental challenges and priorities of a region, to design policies and assess their effectiveness in tackling bottlenecks holding up ecosystem performance, and to allocate resources to more productive and effective uses.

About Dr Kun Fu

Prior to joining Loughborough University London, Dr Kun Fu worked as Research Fellow at the Enterprise Research Centre and Research Associate at Imperial College Business School.

Kun developed a strong multidisciplinary knowledge base integrating the fundamentals of science and technology with management theories and practices. Her research lies in the fields of technology innovation and entrepreneurship and advances the understanding of how entrepreneurs interact with their contexts and examines the outcomes of this process such as firm creation, growth, and innovation.

Find out more about Kun and her research interests on her staff profile.