By Dr Yan Zeng and Professor Ismail Adelopo
If you run a small business in the West of England, you already know what keeps you awake at night: chasing late invoices, weighing up a loan you are not sure you can afford, wondering whether your accountant is giving you the full picture on growth funding. What you may not know is that a team of university researchers at UWE Bristol’s Bristol Business School studies these exact issues – and wants to hear directly from you.
This October, GARG (Governance and Accountability Research Group) is launching the SME Practitioner Roundtable, a new bi-monthly forum designed to bring the people who experience SME financing challenges into the same room as the people who research them. The aim is simple: better research starts with better questions, and the best questions come from practice, not from papers.
Each session will bring together three to four working practitioners – SME owners, finance directors, accountants, lenders, or fintech professionals – with GARG researchers for a focused, 90-minute conversation on a single financing topic. The format puts practitioners first: guests share their frontline experience before our research team responds with evidence and frameworks. The session then opens into moderated discussion, with every conversation aimed at producing something concrete – a joint project idea, a data-sharing lead, a policy briefing, or a guest lecture connection.
This is not a seminar where academics talk and practitioners listen. It is a working session where your experience is the most valuable thing in the room. There are no slides, no jargon, and no preparation required. Sessions are free, hybrid (in-person at Bristol Business School with a Teams option), and operate under Chatham House rules.
The pilot runs from October 2026 to March 2027, with six sessions covering topics including access to credit, cash flow under pressure, fintech adoption, green finance, and growth funding. We are also open to suggestions — if there is a financing issue that keeps coming up in your business or across your clients, it may be exactly the question we should be studying next.
For GARG, the roundtable represents a step change in how we connect research to the regional business community. We plan to engage with partners across UWE Bristol – including the Business and Alumni Partnerships team, the Research and External Engagement service, Scale Up 4 Growth, Help to Grow, and the University Enterprise Zone — as well as external organisations such as the West of England Growth Hub, the FSB South West, Business West, ICAEW, ACCA, and the Institute of Directors. The initiative supports the College’s commitment to practice-led research with real-world impact, and aligns with UWE Bristol’s RISE approach to integrating research, innovation, skills, and enterprise.
We are looking for practitioners who want their experience to shape what gets researched and how. If that sounds like you – or someone you know – we would like to hear from you.
Contact Dr Yan Zeng at yan.zeng@uwe.ac.uk to express your interest, suggest a topic, or find out more.
