Aston Business School · Aston University
International entrepreneurship, AI credibility, and growth under uncertainty.
Associate Professor of International Entrepreneurship and Director of Research Degree Programmes, Aston Business School. Research on how entrepreneurs build and lose credibility across borders and digital markets.
Behind this page: 832,512 individuals across 90 countries, one mark each — the sample behind the entrepreneurial exit study. These fields are generated, not plotted. Each draws one mark per observation in the study it belongs to and its structure mirrors the finding, but the coordinates are not measured values.
Citation figures come from Google Scholar and are refreshed weekly.
Research stories
The real-world problem, the academic idea, the papers behind it, and what is happening in the world right now that the argument speaks to.
Any venture can say it uses AI. Any founder can post about their struggles. Both claims cost almost nothing to make, so classical signalling theory says they should convey nothing. Audiences act on them anyway.
Read the story →Two entrepreneurs in the same country, sector and regulatory regime. One takes the venture across borders, the other never leaves home. Country-level explanations cannot tell you which is which.
Read the story →Digital entrepreneurship is presented as the great equaliser: a laptop and a connection, and anyone can build an international venture. Participation data say otherwise. Rural, female and minority founders remain systematically under-represented precisely where entry is supposedly cheapest.
Read the story →Entrepreneurial firms are pulling out of foreign markets at a rate not seen in two decades. Almost all of it gets reported as failure.
Read the story →The through-line
Standard models of entrepreneurial behaviour assume interchangeable actors, clean information, and signals whose cost belongs to the sender. Cross-cultural and digital contexts violate all three.
Research meets the world
Reporting by others — journalists, regulators, research bodies — not outputs of this research. Each item is tagged with the research story it speaks to. Scroll sideways for more.
A $1.5 billion AI app-builder collapsed after former staff said outsourced human developers, not AI, did most of the work.
The identical claim sustained a unicorn valuation among generalist investors while engineers who could inspect the output saw through it. Two audiences, two costs.
US prosecutors charged nate's founder with raising more than $40 million by claiming AI automation in fact performed by overseas workers.
Enforcement makes an unverifiable claim costly after the fact. That is the mechanism turning cheap talk into a genuine signal.
Across 53 economies, fear of failure deters two in five adults, yet individuals who have previously exited a business are more likely to start again.
An independent replication of the post-exit pattern: exit operates as a mastery experience, not simply as a setback.
A UBS survey finds 63 percent of US founders planning exits, against 38 percent in Europe and 18 percent in Asia-Pacific.
Gaps this large invite a cultural reading, but the survey cannot separate culture from tax regime, market depth or demographics. The mechanism still needs identifying.
SME bank lending rose 9 percent to £68bn in 2025, yet rural, coastal, female-led and ethnic minority-led firms still face the greatest obstacles raising finance.
Headline recovery masks persistent gaps by gender, ethnicity and geography. 51 percent of ethnic minority-led firms anticipate difficulty accessing finance, against 36 percent of White-led firms.
The sixth annual report on the Rose Review-derived Code, now with over 300 signatories including most major UK retail banks.
UK policy still leans on voluntary lender commitments to close the women's finance gap, which keeps evidence on actual participation barriers policy-relevant.
Only 16 percent of more than 2,400 surveyed exporters reported rising export orders in Q2 2026, the weakest reading in two decades outside 2008 and the pandemic.
The headline is an average. Micro-exporters reported 11 percent against 26 percent for large firms, the dispersion this research traces to firm-level capability and cognition.
Thirty-six percent of UK trading SMEs saw US export turnover fall after new tariffs, and 27 percent actively cut their US exposure, shifting toward France and Germany.
Firms did not stop internationalising. They reallocated. Retreat from one market financed presence in another.
Reach
Every highlighted country carries a specific tie — an appointment, a degree, a funded project, fieldwork, a doctorate supervised or examined, or an invited lecture. Hover to see which. The datasets themselves reach further, up to ninety countries in the largest study.
Advisory, speaking & executive education
Firms entering unfamiliar markets, platforms designing credibility, and public bodies building entrepreneurship policy face the same underlying problem: models built on average behaviour fail exactly where the decisions are hardest.
Recognition
Elsewhere: Aston University · Google Scholar · LinkedIn · ResearchGate · ORCID