Alliance Manchester Business School

And a very special guest in the shape of Professor Philip McCann.

And Philip is Sir Terry Leahy Chair in Urban and Regional Economies at the Alliance Manchester Business School.

And he's joining on the show today.

I'm very delighted to say.

In the end, if it's not going to galvanize the investment community, it's not going to happen.

Well, we shall see.

And that's Professor Philip McCann, who's the Terry Leahy Chair in Urban and Regional Economies at the Alliance Manchester Business School.

And of course, Anna Leach, Chief Economist at the ID.

Okay

... maybe top of the tree is Vincent Kompany got an MBA from Manchester Business School-

Nice

... whilst playing at City.

Is that beer or beard? Anyway, you could say he's a pretty unconventional guy.

The bastion of truthiness, Wikipedia, describes him as a British theorist, consultant, and professor at Manchester Business School, but that really only begins to scratch the surface of his esoteric exploration in the field of management cybernetics.

In fact, his involvement with Project Cybersyn in Allende's Chile, complete with a Star Trek-inspired retrofuturistic command room for the technocrats to oversee the Chilean economy in real time, is probably worth an exploration in and of itself.

But today we're going to discuss something different.

The main issue is that you cannot scale in Europe.

So what does scale or scaling up actually mean? I asked Tara Alice, honorary professor at the Productivity Institute at the Alliance Manchester Business School.

There are many different definitions, but generally when people talk about scaling up, they refer to businesses that are growing really very fast.

They might be growing their employment or their revenues by 20% a year, which is vastly greater than the average business might do in a typical year.