Rural Enterprise Hubs (REHs) are mechanisms for bringing together rural businesses. The co-location of businesses drives innovation through knowledge exchange, where face-to-face contact still matters. They provide additional opportunities to network, acquire knowledge, form new collaborations, and create synergies between tenants.
REHs exist in rural areas across the country – see our case studies and resources to find out more.
Having been a Research Fellow at NICRE, I am now an Associate Fellow after joining Scotland’s Rural University College (SRUC) in autumn 2022 as a Research Fellow, focusing on the rural economy, rural communities and land reform. I am a multidisciplinary qualitative researcher and have expertise in rural and regional development, rural sociology, governance, innovation and economic geography.
In addition to NICRE, I have worked at the Centre for Rural Economy, the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (all Newcastle University) and the Centre for Rural Policy Research Centre at the University of Exeter on a variety of projects. These included sustainable rural tourism, the innovativeness of land-based sectors and SMEs, and policy nexus work.
I gained my PhD at the Centre for Rural Economy, focusing on rural enterprise hubs which are physical infrastructure aimed at bringing rural businesses into closer proximity to share knowledge, network and collaborate. The PhD also critiqued (urban-centric) Territorial Innovation Models (TIMs) and analysed the role the hubs played in contributing to these systems and providing rural businesses with access to these.
While at NICRE, I was sponsored by the ESRC to write my PhD findings on rural enterprise hubs into journal articles and I collaborated with colleagues to plan new research agendas around the Centre’s objectives and goals.
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