Marie Curie Success for Professor Allan Williams and Professor Vladimirov

The School of Hospitality and Tourism have been awarded an FP7 Marie Curie grant of 300,000 euros to fund Professor Zhelyu Vladimirov to work with Professor Allan Williams on a two year project on the key factors influencing SME competitiveness.

The project will focus on new factors in global competitiveness, and the interaction between these in different institutional settings and at different stages in the current economic crisis. It will produce a conceptual model of SME competitiveness and will apply this to analysing both samples of Bulgarian SMEs at different dates and comparative samples of tourism SMEs in Bulgaria and the UK.

Professor Vladimirov, who will join the School in summer 2013 is currently a Professor of Management in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Sofia University, Bulgaria. He has published extensively on entrepreneurship, food and agricultural SMEs, and on anomie as a framework for analysing the post communist transition in Eastern Europe. The University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, awarded him a Dr. Hon. In recognition of his work on anomie.