ACS

ACS has today announced a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford to examine the role local shops play in the community. It will be the first KTP project for the Business School. ACS and Saïd have appointed a Research Associate, based at ACS head office, to work on a two-year project to gather and analyse evidence about the community role played by local shops.

ACS Chief Executive James Lowman said: “We are thrilled to be part of this unique partnership. This will bring real benefits to ACS members because it will help us to better understand the community role played by local shops. It is not enough to talk in general terms about the importance of local shops to communities – this project will help to explain and quantify community value in social and economic terms and with a rigour hitherto missing in this important policy debate.

“Our strategy makes explicit the need to develop the evidence base around local shops, and we are committing more funding year-on-year to doing this. Our partnership with Saïd is the centrepiece of this strategy.”

Dr Jonathan Reynolds, Academic Director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management at Saïd Business School, said: “The retail sector within the UK today faces unprecedented challenges. For the independent retailing sector and especially for local shops, these challenges build upon longer term threats to their economic success. We tend to assume that such businesses play a critical, positive, role in safeguarding the viability and vitality of local communities. But little objective, authoritative evidence exists to support this view. Working with ACS, Oxford is well placed to use its 25 years’ experience in retail management research to assess the contribution of those businesses to the communities in which they operate and, cumulatively, to the nation as a whole.”

The KTP project will commence on 1 March, and is part-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through the Council’s Retail Industry Business Engagement Network (RIBEN).