Former Dragons' Den judge Doug Richards will be debating how to improve the prospects for Britain's small businesses in an Incisive/VNU free web seminar next week. 

Richards will be joined by management consultant David Hall, writer and presenter of the Bafta award-winning BBC1 business series Winning, and Alan Hartwell, vice president of consulting, innovations and propositions at Oracle.

The panel will discuss how to improve the environment for small businesses in the UK, why some companies are not innovating enough and how that can be changed, and how productivity can be improved.

The last DTI survey into small businesses found that 26 per cent of all businesses had introduced some kind of new product or service in the year before the survey, while 15 per cent had introduced a new process or way of working in that year.

These were both slight decreases from the 2004 levels of 28 per cent for product/service innovation and 20 per cent for process innovation.

By contrast, the level of entrepreneurship is increasing steadily across the country. In particular the proportion of 16 to 24 year-olds considering or planning to become entrepreneurs has increased to 17.5 per cent from 14.4 per cent in 2003.

The seminar will be held on 26 April at 3pm and participants can register here.