Create
Broaden the enterprise base and enable ambition.
Evidence · Experience · Implementation
Exploring what works.
Frontier brings evidence, practical experience and lessons from elsewhere to questions of business, public policy and economic development.
An economic framework
Create. Connect. Keep.
Stronger local economies need more than isolated interventions. Frontier examines how places can broaden their enterprise base, connect firms to capability and retain more of what successful businesses create.
Connect
Help independent firms borrow capability and scale through relationships.
Keep
Retain or recycle productive capability through succession, ownership change and successful exits.
The cumulative objective: accumulating indigenous productive capacity.
The everyday economy
Small and medium-sized enterprises are the bedrock of economically active communities.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in both the private and third sectors create employment, provide essential services, develop skills and retain capability within places.
Frontier’s understanding comes from working with these organisations every day across the UK. We examine what they need to start, develop and endure, and how their experience and capabilities can contribute to regional economic prosperity.
What Frontier examines
Economic questions grounded in implementation.
Frontier combines respected research, official evidence and examples of implementation elsewhere. It asks not only whether an idea is attractive, but what conditions made it work and how far those conditions can be transferred.
Enterprise and SMEs
Business creation, progression, productivity and the varied ambitions of smaller firms.
Economic ecosystems
The relationships, institutions and shared capabilities that allow independent firms to achieve more.
Ownership and succession
How productive businesses, skills, knowledge and capital can remain or be recycled within an economy.
Skills and productive capacity
The practical capabilities that enable places to make, maintain, adapt and grow.
Heritage and productive preservation
How conservation, purposeful use and selected catalytic projects can build skills and enterprise.
Evidence and implementation
What has been tried, what happened, why it mattered and what the evidence can support.
Engage Frontier
Rigorous thinking applied to practical questions.
Organisations can engage Frontier for business planning, consultancy and advisory work, workshops, speaking and structured stakeholder work.