Innovation and Entrepeneurship
Innovation refers to renewing, changing or creating more effective processes, products or ways of doing things. Entrepreneurship is the practice of starting a new business or reviving an existing business, in order to capitalize on new found opportunities. The contribution of entrepreneurship and innovation to economic prosperity has grown with the shift of the global economy towards a mode of production in which knowledge has become a key input.
My research in this area studies the transfers of new technology and knowledge from universities to industry and the collaborations between universities and firms. Together with Mireia Jofre-Bonet, I obtained funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK’s leading public research funding agency, to create a large database on academic and knowledge transfer activities of the academic engineers in the UK in the last 20 years. We have studied the controversial side effects of collaboration on the production of academic research. I am currently investigating which universities and firms enter into collaborative agreements, and the outcomes of these collaborations.