‘Bouncing Higher’ was a successful balanced learning approach by six North West Universities in the UK. It was a combination of action learning, open learning and coaching - which helped 130 small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the North of England increase their Gross Value Added profitability through innovation by some 24.5%.
Bouncing Higher originated under the name ‘NetworkNorthWest’ at the University of Salford and ran between 2004 and 2007. It was developed to address the issues relating to poor take up of traditional business support by SMEs and because of the generally low levels of engagement of the business community with Institutes of Higher Education (HEIs).
Originally funded by the North West Development Agency (NWDA), NetworkNorthWest was specifically developed to improve innovation, entrepreneurship, enterprise and wealth creation in the regional SME business community through educational micro-networking - networking to learn from, and with, others in a similar position in other SMEs. In particular, it mainly used ‘Action Learning’ techniques which allowed the SME participants to set their own agenda for what they felt they needed to learn. Six or seven SME owner managers worked in an action learning set supported by one university facilitator. Each SME participant brought to monthly set meetings, problems facing them. They were then given their own time to discuss their problems, and potential for solution, with their colleagues. With good facilitation the SMEs gained confidence to consider their issue afresh and often came up with their own solutions, supported by their peers who acted as ‘partners in adversity’. The approach was a huge success and led to the benchmarking of its best practice against similar learning developments regionally, nationally and internationally.
The programme benefited by working with six delivery partner universities across the North West of England. Their support was multi-disciplinary and multifaceted (including applied research, knowledge transfer, management and professional development and provision of sector specific training for employees) and there was potential to deliver support in the form of face-to-face contact right across the region on a local basis or with on-line resources. The project, seen as exemplary by the NWDA, has since delivered support for Manchester Chamber Business Enterprises to further cohorts of SMEs across Greater Manchester and beyond. And since the completion of the pilot development, the core process has been adopted as the basis for a second level of intervention for leadership development by the Northern Leadership Academy. It also significantly improved the profitability of the SMEs who took part through the impact of innovative processes and developments enabled by the Action Learning by a Gross Value Added of 24.5 %.
During the course of the initial project, 118 SMEs had been prepared to invest more than 30 hours contact time to the project, while the remainder had between three and 30 hours; this is a considerable commitment from business people who are frequently unwilling to give up even the moist minimal time for training and education. All participants grew in confidence and every participant had a different but rewarding learning outcome. For SMEs to spend such amounts of time engaged in mid-career professional learning is a key finding in its own right, since many traditional courses fail to get anywhere near this level of engagement. It is also interesting to note that several of the Action Learning Sets were so enamoured of the process that they elected to continue the meetings after the end of the project support, taking over the facilitation of the meetings themselves.
One of the most interesting overall outcomes of the project was the powerful business camaraderie the approach engendered, in what were initially seen to be competitor SMEs; this togetherness, and the willingness to express it, is summarised visually in the photograph above.
The SMEs were often enrolled through ‘word of mouth’ as early adopters convince other SMEs to become involved. By the completion of the pilot, a large cohort of professional learners who find learning about anything new notoriously difficult had not only become deeply engaged, but highly empowered. The photograph above actually represents many of those who took part in our action learning programme ‘bouncing down’ King Street in Manchester in the middle of the rush hour. They did this as they had become so delighted with the process that they wanted to encourage other SMEs to come to an event to mark the end of the formal learning processes. It shows the enjoyment they all felt in taking part in this influential programme of learning and is a representation of the name that they collectively gave to their learning experiences, namely ‘bouncing higher’. For them, Action Learning was the educational process that enabled them to ‘bounce ideas off against each other’ and learn in a relaxed way with ‘partners in adversity’ to become more creative in their work for wealth creation. This programme epitomizes a potentially new way of working between academe and small businesses, which developed from meaningful and maturing conversations between those who had traditionally used different languages to describe the world.
The Action Learning approach was clearly an extremely good way of getting those who are traditionally weak learners, including those who had failed in the educational system, to fully engage and grow in capability and competence. Once the confidence of the SME owner managers grew, it was quickly possible to offer them taster sessions and lead them back into more formal learning environments. Coaching overcome individual issues and problems both on technological/managerial issues as well as emotional ones. Open learning, in the form of e materials written by, and therefore for SMEs, also proved extremely useful in providing detailed content on specific problems for each SME.
This case highlights the importance of two key findings that come from all my studies to date of universities reaching out to ‘excluded communities’, whether they be SMEs or others. Firstly, the willingness of universities to want to engage with a wider group of participants, such as SMEs, and how a cost effective and highly interactive learning can be developed by those HEIs who want to make a real difference to communities traditionally excluded from access to university capability; the necessary micro-scale engagements to overcome the resistance from such learners can be developed using current learning technologies that really do work, if universities are willing to try. Secondly, it is the leadership of projects such as these which are so necessary in universities that are traditionally extremely conservative in helping people from such small scale, disparate, excluded and fragmented communities. In particular, the creative senior leadership of the university to engage in such programmes of work it critical to ensure success, as is the differently creative leadership required to develop learning or innovation outcomes that make a real impact on organizations like SMEs.
The above is an extract from Powell, J.A. (2013) The University role in the Innovative Leadership of Small to Medium Sized Enterprises –towards ‘Universities for a Modern Renaissance’ (UMR), in the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research edited by Rose, M. and Jack, S. published by Emareld, Newcastle. For a deeper discussion of the project, and particularly the Action Learning component of this project, please read Powell, J. A. and Houghton, J. (2008) Action Learning as a core process for SME business support, in Action Learning: Research and Practice, Vol. 2 Number 1, published by Routledge