Academic and policy interest in productivity rarely captures the experiences of an important segment of the small firm population: micro-businesses (1-9 employees). The informal and opaque management processes in such firms pose challenges for the assessment of productivity and development of practical interventions. This project uses rigorous academic research co-produced with non-academic stakeholders to design and implement policies that support management to boost productivity in such firms. Our context - disadvantaged communities managing and working in the catering, retail and creative sectors in the West Midlands - serve as a critical case to improve knowledge and practice on the relationship between management and engagement practices and performance in micro-businesses. The research is collaborative and comprises three leading applied centres with researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds: the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME), the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) and City-REDI (Regional Economic Development Institute). They work alongside non-academic stakeholders that rarely feature in 'mainstream' business support ecosystems (despite their reach in myriad micro-enterprise networks): Ashley Integrates (an award-winning social enterprise with a keen interest in promoting employability of migrants), the Bangladeshi Network (comprising four groups with local and national reach into the sector), Citizens UK (a national civil society alliance) and Punch Records (a business with a strong social mission to promote artists from deprived background). A multi-method is adopted comprising five WPs that aim to develop insights into micro-businesses that can be used to develop interventions to promote productivity. WP 1 locates the project in the context of a recent national study on the characteristics of microbusinesses. Further analysis will highlight challenges facing those micro-businesses that have a desire to improve performance and grow. A granular understanding of management and engagement practices in micro-businesses will be generated in WP2 by in-depth qualitative investigation of 24 case studies of firms over an extended period of time. Manager and worker perspectives on the organization of work are evaluated. This knowledge is shared and utilized in WP 3 with a range of non-academic stakeholders, with the aim of mapping and mobilizing the business support ecosystem. Policy options will be identified, which will then - in WP4 - be tested and evaluated with micro-business owners who have the ambition to participate in bespoke change programmes to boost productivity. An active programme of knowledge exchange and dissemination (WP5) will cross-cut the project and will comprise a series of journey mapping knowledge exchange co-produced workshops, involving micro-business owner/managers and their employees, and external support agencies. These are designed to understand how involvement in the study has influenced any change to initial management style towards introducing new management and engagement practices, and how these have improved productivity. WP5 will also inform dissemination, and the qualitative component of the formative and summative evaluation. The project will produce important practical outcomes for businesses my providing support for evidence-based interventions that will benefit around 30 micro-businesses that participate in customised programmes designed to upgrade leadership and management skills leading to a boost in productivity. Insights from their experiences and will promote greater understanding of 'what works' that can guide practitioners in other contexts. The project will also actively support the development of a more responsive and inclusive business support ecosystem in the West Midlands by mobilising 'mainstream' and non-traditional intermediaries (for example, our non-academic partners) and via multiple pathways of engagement.

The recent Casey Review (2016) and Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper (2018) have revived integration as a national policy priority. The problem these strategies address is the perceived lack of integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities. The fix they propose combines English Language provision and the promotion of 'fundamental British values' with curbs on immigration and interventions to address what are viewed as harmful cultural practices. Whilst most will agree that integration is desirable, there are different views on what integration is and how best to achieve it. Our approach is distinctive in at least three ways. First, we view integration as a process involving everyone, not just immigrants and ethnic minorities. The drawback of approaches that single out certain populations as 'unintegrated' is that they relieve other, 'integrated' populations of responsibility for integration. Integration, we argue, can only work if it involves everyone, where everyone shares its responsibilities and benefits. Second, we view integration as beginning in the situated practices and local contexts of everyday life. The drawback of approaches that stress fundamental national values is they trade in abstractions that may have little bearing on people's day-to-day concerns. Integration, we argue, should be pursued and achieved through social intercourse grounded in everyday life, not (only) through the promotion of abstract national values. Third, we view integration as a bottom-up phenomenon, where the aim of policy should be to capture and encourage existing best practices whilst simultaneously attenuating local barriers to integration. The drawback of approaches pitched at the national level is they are less sensitive to variation in local context. Integration, we argue, must begin with and attend to the specificities of local context. Our Everyday Integration approach reclaims and retools integration for academic and policy purposes. Our approach represents a step change in the scholarship on integration. Integration has been criticised for its assimilationist undertones and lack of conceptual clarity, leading some to abandon it in favour of cognate concepts such as incorporation or inclusion. Given integration's continued policy relevance, however, our aim instead is to redefine and reclaim it in ways that identify and then remedy its earlier shortcomings. We begin with integration as an assortment of locally grounded everyday practices and mobilities that facilitate meaningful and constructive social exchange. We will develop this approach as our main scholarly intervention to integration. Our approach is designed to achieve maximum impact for the everyday users and agents of integration. Integration is not just a matter of fostering good relations between citizens and migrants in national contexts. Rather, integration occurs through the grounded practices, exchanges, and mobilities of everyday life in local contexts. Our policy interventions are designed to capture and facilitate existing good practices whilst simultaneously addressing remaining barriers to integration. Working with the Mayor of Bristol, the Bristol City Council, and a wide range of City and Community Partners, we will use our research findings to co-produce and implement an Integration Strategy for Bristol. We will then distil the insights from our research and Strategy to formulate an Integration Toolkit that can be flexibly adapted for other urban contexts across Britain. Rather than simply seeing the lack of integration as a problem, we contend that a focus on the ways in which different groups of mobile and settled residents of the city already experience and practice integration - that is, the people who are its everyday architects and agents - can provide insights and creative approaches for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and foster integration.

Digital technologies are becoming pervasive in society, from online shopping and social interactions through to finance, banking, transportation. With a future vision of smart cities, driven by a real-time, data-driven, digital economy, privacy is paramount. It is critical to engendering trust in the digital fabric on which society relies and is enshrined as a fundamental human right in the Universal Declation of Human Rights and regulations such as GDPR. Significant efforts have been made -- end-to-end encryption, anonymous communication, privacy nutrition labels in iOS and Android -- to provide users with more agency in understanding, controlling and assuring the way their data and information is processed and shared. However, this ability to control, understand and assure is not equitably experienced across society. Examples include individuals from lower-income groups who have to share devices to access services that may include sensitive information or victims of intimate partner violence whereby an innocuous app (such as find my phone) or digital device (such as a smart doorbell) may be used to monitor their activities and who cannot use online reporting tools for fear of traceability. Such vulnerable and marginalised populations have specific privacy and information control needs and threat models whereby different types of privacy controls may serve as both protection mechanisms and attack vectors. These needs and requirements are not typically foregrounded to software developers. The challenge is compounded by the fact developers are neither privacy experts nor typically have the training, tools, support and guidance to design for the diverse privacy needs of marginalised and vulnerable groups. We argue that, for privacy to be of meaningful and equitable value in our pervasive digital economy, everyone must be able to easily control how they share personal information, understand with whom they are sharing it, and ensure that sharing is limited to the intended purpose. The project will work hand-in-hand with third sector organisations supporting such communities to develop: New methods: a threat modelling approach, supported by a set of threat catalogues, that enables different "modalities" of protection logic whereby one can switch attackers, contextualise the vulnerabilities and acknowledge different types of controls as both protection mechanisms and attack vectors. New digital tools: a privacy-in-use nutrition framework that promotes privacy-literacy in vulnerable and marginalised populations, identifies privacy concerns in-use and facilitates developer responses built through new application programming interfaces and evaluated through novel metrics supporting equitable privacy. New processes: co-created, stakeholder-led revisions to the AREA framework for Responsible Innovation to lend structure to the way in which individuals, teams, and organisations approach deep thinking about equitable digital futures. Our research will make the privacy needs of marginalised and vulnerable populations first-class considerations in designing and developing software applications and services to enable equitable privacy experiences. This, in turn, will enable universal privacy responses to work together and support particular responses to privacy issues experienced by vulnerable users.

The Social Mobility Innovation Partnership (SMIP): city regions will bring together community partners, policy makers, city leaders, local industry and researchers to analyse barriers to social mobility, establish which can be most effectively tackled in a local context, and then co-create effective interventions that seek to make a real impact on those barriers. The SMIP will be established within the Greater Bristol city region, reaching out through its national partners and the LPIP Strategic Coordination Hub, to Core Cities across the UK. Our ambition is for the SMIP to deliver a programme of activity to promote social mobility and enable neighbourhoods and communities to develop and thrive, in turn supporting inclusive and sustainable growth in city regions. It will operate via three thematic lenses: 1. Access to education, skills and meaningful employment opportunities 2. Sustainable living and places 3. Culture and identity The project will adopt a participatory iterative research design. In Phase 1, the Partnership will explore the needs and opportunities for collaboration across all three themes through data gathering, landscape and evidence analysis and a series of workshops, chaired by co-investigators from key community groups. It will take a deep dive into the theme of 'Access to skills and employment in the green economy', applying learning and a 'what works' approach to the establishment of an appropriate model for Phase 2, as well as drawing on Bristol's extensive track-record in Connected Community approaches. The proposal has significant local and national support from senior political, academic, professional, and community leaders. It has the potential to transform the futures of disadvantaged and minority communities in the Bristol city region, influencing social mobility and inclusive growth in city regions across the UK.