Financing Green Innovative SMEs: Regional Perspectives

This conference aims to engage practitioners, academics and policy makers in setting the agenda for financing green innovative SMEs from a regional perspective. It follows the recent UK Government Green Finance Strategy (July, 2019), promoting a ‘sustainable and resilient economy’ through developing a globally leading Green Finance sector investment in green technologies, services and related infrastructure. A key issue for the newly established UK Green Finance Institute will be how to operationalise coherent policy, both nationally and regionally, to engage with SMEs and financiers and deliver a sustainable, just and regionally equitable transition to a net zero carbon economy by 2050.

A major concern for this conference is the insufficient attention paid to high-risk early stage green innovative SMEs’ access to finance. The Paris 2015 climate change agreement raised international public policy awareness to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; regional and national governments and international institutions (e.g. World Bank and European Union) have focused on financing instruments (e.g. Green Investment Banks) to deliver large-scale green industry infrastructure – notably for green energy and transport.

High-risk early stage green innovative SMEs’ inability to access finance prevents their more rapid development of potentially game changing low carbon innovations across a wide range of sectors, leading to welfare loss for the society. Cleantech, green innovative start-ups and scale-up SMEs face significant challenges in accessing finance, yet play a significant role in disruptive green innovation (Owen et al, 2018). Given the size, scope and embeddedness of SMEs within the national and international industrial fabric, appropriate public policy in this area could make a sizeable contribution to addressing climate change.

This conference, supported by CUSP, ISBE and Birmingham City University builds on prior BCU, Middlesex and Kingston events that considered issues related to entrepreneurial finance. The aim of this conference is to bring together academics, policy makers and practitioners to consider regional, national and international policy and the development of a more effective early stage green innovation finance ecosystem.

Call for Papers

Finally, the conference offers the opportunity to develop papers for the Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management on ‘Entrepreneurial Finance for Green Innovative SMEs’. For further information, please contact Dr Robyn Owen (r.owen@mdx.ac.uk).