Dr Catherine Brentnall

Catherine Brentnall

Dr Catherine Brentnall

Senior Lecturer

My profile

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of Strategy, Enterprise and Sustainability, having joined the team in September 2023.

I am a long-time practitioner in Enterprise Education and bring strong practice sensibilities and policy interest to teaching and research. I also ran a consultancy for several years, achieving investment and working for clients across the UK and Europe and this practical experience informs my thinking and approaches.

I teach across a range of modules relating to enterprise/entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial development at undergraduate and post graduate level. From August 2024 I am leading the MSc in Entrepreneurship and a new unit on Transformational Applied Entrepreneurship in the new MBA programme. 

My research interests are inspired by problems I encounter in practice and often involve challenging taken-for-granted assumptions. I enjoy adapting (or developing) approaches to inquiry in ways that help me explore and question the status quo. My PhD research involved proposing the concept of Competitive Enterprise Education and using Realist Evaluation to explore for whom (and what) such activities work well for (or not) and why. More recently, in light of the climate and ecological crisis, I have been exploring how Enterprise might orient itself away from Business as Usual, for example through focusing on Regenerative Business Design.

I have published in journals including the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, the Journal of Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy. I am the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) Track Co-Chair for RMPI (Research Methods, Practice Inquiry/Impact) and a board member at Enterprise Educators UK, the leading independent membership network for enterprise educators. 

I am always interested in receiving doctoral supervision enquiries for research projects in the areas including, but not limited to: enterprise and entrepreneurship education; sustainable shifts in enterprise and entrepreneurship education; sustainable, cooperative, regenerative enterprise and related education; applications and adaptations of Realist Evaluation in business and education contexts; creative research methods and approaches to inquiry.

Get in touch

BS 5.38 Business School

Projects

In June 2024 I completed a research project commissioned by Kirklees Council and the Cooperative Councils Innovation Network (CCIN). The project looked at cooperative business impacts, from a Realist perspective. Literature synthesis and stakeholder interviews were used to develop an explanatory perspective on what makes cooperatives business impacts possible. The report focused on worker coops, energy coops and childcare coops. It will be part of a toolkit launched by the CCIN in autumn 2024.

In July 2023 I completed a research project funded by Enterprise Educators UK, entitled: Enterprise Education and Planetary Sustainability: What can EE do? The project involved developing and testing a workshop process to catalyse conversation about how Enterprise can/should change in light of the climate crisis. A toolkit developed from this project  - Enterprise Education and Planetary Sustainability: What can EE do? (Brentnall and Higgins, 2023) - is available on my ResearchGate profile. The toolkit elaborates a dialogic perspective on how change happens - that reality is constructed through conversations and interactions that people have everyday, and therefore changing any situation requires changing the conversation. Academic outputs from this project were an article, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education in a time of Climate and Ecological Breakdown (Brentnall and Higgins, forthcoming), and a chapter, Modes of Inquiry for a World Worth Living in for All (Brentnall, 2023). 

In addition I have previously co-authored applications for, and co-delivered, European projects, including Erasmus+ projects and a Horizon 2020 project about enterprise, entrepreneurship social innovation.  

Research outputs