Aston Business School · Aston University
International entrepreneurship, AI and digital credibility, and growth under uncertainty.
Associate Professor of International Entrepreneurship, Aston Business School. Research on how entrepreneurs build and lose credibility across borders, AI claims and digital markets.
Background: one dot for each of the 832,512 people across 90 countries in my entrepreneurial exit study. The image is illustrative and does not plot the data.
My research examines how entrepreneurs make decisions, grow internationally and build credibility. The themes below bring together the research findings and their implications for business and policy.
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 carry no information. Yet audiences act on them.
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Take two entrepreneurs in one country, sector and regulatory regime. One takes the venture abroad and the other never leaves home. Country-level explanations cannot tell you which will do which.
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Entrepreneurship policy often assumes that once a market, platform or support scheme exists, people will use it. The published evidence is less encouraging. Gender, geography, family expectations, finance, access to technology and institutional voids decide who can act on an opportunity in the first place.
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Entrepreneurial firms are pulling out of foreign markets at a rate not seen in two decades. Almost all of it is reported as failure.
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Photographs by Teemu Paananen, paws and prints, Iwaria Inc. and Timelab, via Unsplash.
My research examines how cultural settings, the quality of information and audience expectations shape entrepreneurial decisions.
Selected reporting from journalists, regulators and research organisations, with commentary on its relevance to the research themes.
A $1.5 billion AI app-builder collapsed after former staff said outsourced human developers, not AI, did most of the work.
Generalist investors accepted the claim and gave the company a unicorn valuation, while engineers who could inspect the output saw through it. Two audiences reached two different verdicts.
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.
This independently replicates the post-exit pattern in my research. Exiting a business works as a mastery experience as well as a setback.
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.
The overall recovery hides lasting gaps by gender, ethnicity and region. 51 percent of ethnic minority-led firms expect difficulty accessing finance, compared with 36 percent of White-led firms.
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 figure is an average. 11 percent of micro-exporters reported rising orders, against 26 percent of large firms. My research links gaps like this to firm-level capability and cognition.
Connections across 16 countries include academic appointments, education, funded projects, fieldwork, doctoral supervision and examination, and invited lectures. My largest study draws on data from 90 countries.
Advisory work, speaking and executive education focus on international growth, entrepreneurial strategy and credibility in digital markets. Each engagement is shaped around the organisation’s priorities and the evidence relevant to its decisions.
