Dylan Jones-Evans (born 16 May 1966) was born in Bangor, Gwynedd and brought up in Pwllheli on the Llyn Peninsula. He is currently Assistant Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Enterprise) and the chair in entrepreneurship at the University of South Wales. He is visiting professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Turku in Finland, newspaper columnist and the creator of the Wales Fast Growth 50, an annual barometer of entrepreneurial firms in Wales.
Jones-Evans has published over 100 articles within edited books, academic conference proceedings and refereed journals, including the Journal of Economic Geography, R&D Management, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Small Business Economics, International Small Business Journal, Technovation and Regional Studies.[citation needed] Along with Professor Sara Carter, he is the co-author of the textbook Enterprise and Small Business.[1]
He has initiated over £40million of development projects,[citation needed] and has attracted research grants from the ESRC, the European Commission, the Leverhulme Trust and the Nuffield Foundation.[citation needed] One project was the first European transnational research study of the role of universities in technology transfer and spin-off activities in Europe.[2]
He has worked as a consultant for the OECD, the European Union and other economic development bodies[which?], and was the lead author of the Entrepreneurship Action Plan for Wales,[3] the first regional enterprise strategy in the world.[which?] He led the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project in Wales for eight years and is currently a member of the "Be The Spark" panel,[4] which has worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop an entrepreneurship strategy for Wales on behalf of the Welsh Government. He also served as a member of the Business Advisory Panel for the Secretary of State for Wales between 2010 and 2014 and led a major review of business finance for the Welsh Government.[5]
He is currently chairman of Town Square,[6] which is developing facilities for entrepreneurs in the UK, and a trustee of Fabric, a social enterprise in Swansea helping homeless young people.[7]
Jones-Evans has created number of events to promote and celebrate entrepreneurship in Wales including the Wales Fast Growth 50,[8] the Cardiff Business Awards, Wales Start-Up Awards,[9] and the Wales Legal Awards.[10] He is a weekly columnist since 2004 in the Western Mail[11] - where he compiles the annual lists of the Top 300 firms in Wales and the Wales Fast Growth 50 list of the fastest growing Welsh businesses - and the Daily Post,[12] and is now a contributor to the online news site Business News Wales.[13]
Recent journal publications
Klofsten, Magnus; Jones-Evans, Dylan; Pereira, Luciana (April 2021). "Teaching science and technology PhD students in entrepreneurship-potential learning opportunities and outcomes". The Journal of Technology Transfer. 46 (2): 319–334. doi:10.1007/s10961-020-09784-8.
Zhao, Tianshu; Jones-Evans, Dylan (18 October 2016). "SMEs, banks and the spatial differentiation of access to finance". Journal of Economic Geography: lbw029. doi:10.1093/jeg/lbw029.
Rhisiart, Martin; Jones-Evans, Dylan (January 2016). "The impact of foresight on entrepreneurship: The Wales 2010 case study". Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 102: 112–119. doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2015.03.010.
Zhang, Qiantao; MacKenzie, Niall G.; Jones-Evans, Dylan; Huggins, Robert (October 2016). "Leveraging knowledge as a competitive asset? The intensity, performance and structure of universities' entrepreneurial knowledge exchange activities at a regional level". Small Business Economics. 47 (3): 657–675. doi:10.1007/s11187-016-9759-0.
Jones-Evans, Dylan (2 January 2015). "Access to finance to SMEs at a regional level – the case of Finance Wales". Venture Capital. 17 (1–2): 27–41. doi:10.1080/13691066.2015.1052624.
Development Bank of Wales
In 2013, he was asked by the Welsh Government to undertake a detailed review examining Access to Finance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Wales. The two reports[14][15] produced by the review criticised the Welsh Government's former investment fund Finance Wales as being unfit for purpose, mainly because of the high interest rates charged to businesses and the unwillingness to consider using state aid rules to make finance affordable to Welsh firms. He recommended the creation of a new Development Bank to support funding for Welsh SMEs. He was subsequently appointed chair of the Development Bank of Wales' Task and Finish Group, which drew up a plan for the creation of this body by the Welsh Government. In May 2015, the National Assembly for Wales voted to call "on the Welsh Government to establish a Welsh Development Bank, as recognised in the report published by Professor Dylan Jones-Evans".[16] The DBW was established in 2017.
Swansea University is a public research university located in Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are businesses whose personnel and revenue numbers fall below certain limits. The abbreviation "SME" is used by many national agencies and international organizations such as the World Bank, the OECD, European Union, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Mair Eluned Morgan, Baroness Morgan of Ely,, is a Welsh Labour politician who has served as First Minister of Wales and Leader of Welsh Labour since 2024. She previously served as Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care in the Welsh Government from 2021 to 2024.
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Andrew David Davies is a Welsh Labour politician, who represented the constituency of Swansea West in the National Assembly for Wales. Davies was born in Hereford to Welsh parents; his mother is from Llandeilo and his father from Holywell, Flintshire. Davies attended Hereford Cathedral School and Swansea University, where he trained as a teacher.
Leighton Andrews is an academic and former Welsh Labour politician. He was the National Assembly for Wales member for Rhondda from 2003 until 2016. He was Minister for Children, Education & Lifelong Learning from 2009 to 2011, then Minister for Education and Skills in the Welsh Government until his resignation on 25 June 2013 after an alleged conflict between his own departmental policy and his active campaigning to save a school in his constituency. In September 2014 he returned to the government as Minister for Public Services.
The Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) of the European Commission is meant to improve the competitiveness of European companies facing the challenges of globalization. The programme is mainly aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which will receive support for innovation activities, better access to finance and business support services. It will run from 2007 to 2013.
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Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk, and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.
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Sir Derek William Jones, KCB is Chair of the Prince's Trust in Wales, Board Director (non-executive) of IQE, Chair of Keolis UK and served as permanent secretary to the Welsh Government between 2013 and 2017.
The UCL School of Management is the business school of University College London (UCL). The School offers undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD and executive programmes in management, entrepreneurship, business analytics, business information systems, and finance.
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