Aston Business School has long been recognised as one of the UK’s leading institutions for small business research and support. With a strong reputation for entrepreneurship and productivity research, Aston’s Centre for Growth has delivered a wide portfolio of programmes helping SMEs to innovate, grow, and scale. However, as demand for impact-driven, evidence-based support increased, the team needed a robust, consistent way to benchmark performance and demonstrate the tangible outcomes of their interventions.

“We’re seen now as the go-to place for research evidence on small business growth and productivity,” explains Professor Mark Hart, Professor of Small Business and Entrepreneurship at Aston University. “But we needed a way to translate that evidence into practical insight for the businesses we work with.”

The Challenge

For over a decade, Aston’s growth programmes had supported thousands of entrepreneurs across sectors. Yet one recurring question from participants highlighted a key challenge:

“Business owners would ask, ‘How do I perform against other firms like mine?’ and we couldn’t give a definitive answer,” says Professor Hart. “We had lots of qualitative feedback, but no consistent, data-driven way to benchmark performance.”

This challenge reflected a wider issue across the business support ecosystem, fragmented data, multiple disconnected assessments, and difficulty tracking performance change over time. Without a shared framework, it was hard to demonstrate how interventions translated into improved productivity, innovation, and competitiveness.

The Solution 

To address this, Aston University adopted the GC Insight Growth and Performance Platform (formerly Benchmark Index) a powerful suite of digital diagnostics, benchmarking, and impact tracking tools that provide an objective, evidence-based view of business performance.

The platform enabled Aston’s advisers and researchers to:

• Benchmark performance against tens of thousands of similar businesses in the UK and internationally
• Diagnose needs across key drivers of productivity including leadership, people and culture, innovation, digital adoption, and internationalisation
• Track performance change over time, providing longitudinal evidence of programme impact
• Embed consistency across programmes through a unified diagnostic and reporting framework

“The ability to pull out robust benchmark data and show where a business sits within its sector is invaluable,” says Professor Hart. “It helps business owners see where they’re ahead of the pack and where they’re falling behind and that creates the motivation to act.”

Impact and Outcomes

The adoption of the Growth and Performance Platform has transformed the way Aston University delivers and evidences its support:

• Improved productivity and performance: Businesses supported through Aston’s programmes can now identify and track improvements in profitability, customer retention, and efficiency, directly linking interventions to measurable growth.
• Consistent, professional delivery: Every participating business now experiences the same high-quality diagnostic process, ensuring consistency across advisers, programmes, and cohorts.
• Evidence-based programme design: Real-time benchmarking data informs future programme content, ensuring support focuses on areas with the greatest potential for productivity uplift.
• Integration across the ecosystem: The platform allows Aston to collaborate more effectively with partners across the UK, sharing anonymised insights and contributing to national research on what drives small business success.

“It’s not just about evaluation at the end,” notes Professor Hart. “This gives us real-time feedback — genuine evidence of what’s working. If we could roll this out to every small business in the country, it would be of tremendous benefit.”

By embedding the GC Insight Performance Platform at the heart of its growth and productivity programmes, Aston University has strengthened its reputation as a national leader in evidence-led business support. The platform has empowered Aston’s team to deliver a more consistent, data-driven experience for SMEs, one that motivates action, measures real impact, and contributes to a stronger, more productive business ecosystem.

“It’s now an integral part of how we help firms grow,” concludes Professor Hart. “It allows us to turn data into dialogue and dialogue into measurable change.”

Find out more

Discover how the GC Insight Growth and Performance Platform can help your organisation deliver consistent, data-driven support that boosts productivity and business growth. Book a discovery call here.