Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Research)

The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship comprises a group of academic staff with research interests in two related areas: design innovation and entrepreneurship, spanning both commercial and social sectors. This includes research wholly contained within one of these disciplines or bridging both subjects.

The centre has a reputation for a collaborative and participatory approach to teaching and research, ensuring impact for its stakeholders.

The profile of our team, most of whom are both practitioners and scholars, helps to ensure continual collaboration between academic and non-academic applied settings. We, therefore, welcome and encourage students from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Students may join directly from university studies or be experienced professionals, for example, established entrepreneurs or designers.

Our research areas include:

Entrepreneurship

• Strategy

• Entrepreneurial behaviours

• Mergers and acquisitions

• Entrepreneurship education

• Social justice

• Innovation leadership and culture

• Enterprise education

• Design thinking

• Service design

• Wicked problems

• Social innovation

• Interdisciplinary partnerships

• Drivers of company performance

Design innovation

• Design for sustainability

• Design

• Consumer behaviour

• Design for policy

• Feminist design

• Futures and scenarios

• Human-centred design / prototyping

• UX/interface design / human-computer interaction

• Ethics, governance, and regulation of emerging technologies and AI

• Design for social innovation

• Advertising

• Nature-centred design

For more information visit the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/innovation/

Possible start dates are September 2026 and January 2027. Please see the programme page on our website for more information.