Manufacturing companies run by graduates are five times more likely to be successful exporters, according to research carried out by the accountancy firm Coopers & Lybrand. This was announced at the conference of the National Institute of Small Business Affairs (ISBA), which was held in Belfast last week and attracted 300 delegates from the UK, France, Denmark, the US, and the Republic.

The survey is one of the largest ever carried out on the small business sector. It involved more than 500 Northern Ireland companies and the data collected runs to 2,700 computer pages. The full findings will be announced early next year.

It reveals that only 25 per cent of the chief executives of small businesses had any kind of third level education and that 76 per cent of small firms in Northern Ireland are family-run.

The managing partner of Coopers & Lybrand, Mr Stephen Kingon, says that the aim of the survey is to identify what made an entrepreneur and to define the characteristics of a successful company.

"While our small business sector has survived over the years," he says, "it still isn't growing fast enough to compete internationally. That is the only way we are going to turn Northern Ireland from an economy which is led by the public sector into one which is dominated by the private sector."

The survey finds that the most successful companies have chief executives with some form of third level education, were looking to increase their sales overseas and had introduced more formal planning and control systems within the business.

"These companies also have a different attitude to grants," Mr Kingon says. "They tend to be more strongly in favour of grants for training assistance, export and marketing support, rather than in capital or revenue grants. Companies operating solely in the Northern Ireland market, on the other hand, tend to look for the reintroduction of capital grants."

Mr Chris Buckland, the chief executive of the small business agency LEDU, says that the research confirmed what the agency had previously only been aware of from anecdotal evidence.

"I think it's fascinating to note that it is the entrepreneurs who focus only on the local market who think that capital grants are vital to their business," he says. "It reinforces our view that grants are useful only as part of a series of structured interventions. In isolation, they are broadly speaking a waste of time."