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Dr. Rebecca Harding

Rebecca is Founder and Managing Director of Delta Economics Ltd and the World Entrepreneur Society. She has been Executive Director worldwide of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a research consortium of 42 countries around the world led by London Business and Babson College.  As part of this, she organised the GEM Forum in January 2007 and brought together 450 leading academics, thought leaders, policy makers and business leaders from around the world to debate the role of entrepreneurship in economic development.  Previously she was an Associate Director of Research at Deloitte.  Until December 2004 she was Chief Economist at The Work Foundation as well as a Senior Fellow at London Business School. She has worked with the Institute for Public Policy Research, a London-based think-tank, on entrepreneurship and venture capital policy and was a Senior Lecturer at the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. 

Rebecca works has been a specialist adviser to the Treasury Select Committee on Regional Productivity and has worked closely with the All Party Parliamentary Group.  She was a member of the HMT-DTI specialist group on productivity indicators and a member of the DTI’s Stakeholder Group advising on the implementation of the government’s science strategy.  Her work on venture capital has been widely used in the UK to inform policy on Enterprise Capital Funds and she has worked advising German venture capital companies on locating in the UK. She has an extensive, international reputation for her research, as well as an international policy and business background.  

Her specialisms include public policy and economic research, innovation management, venture capital, scientific entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and work organisation and productivity and has advised the EU, Inter-trade Ireland, the UK and Danish governments and German regional governments on innovation and entrepreneurship and venture capital policy.  She sat on the academic panel advising the UK’s government’s innovation review and advised the Accounting for People Taskforce. Her work on social entrepreneurship in the UK has set international standards for measuring the scale of this type of entrepreneurial activity internationally. 

Rebecca has been a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck Management School and the Max Planck Institute for Economic Systems Research in Jena, Germany. She is a Senior Entrepreneurship Fellow at the University of Essex. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an Academician with the Association of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences and a Director of the German-British Forum,  on the Advisory Board of Birmingham Business School and academic advisory panel of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School, Oxford.  

She is the author of 9 books and over 150 academic and policy articles and reports. Her key publications include “The Missing Link – from productivity to performance” report of the first Work and Enterprise panel of Inquiry, November 2003 (with Marc Cowling and Natalie Turner) and “The New Jerusalem” (May 2001, with John Knell). Other relevant publications include the annual GEM UK report and the UK’s social entrepreneurship monitor (available here),  Venture Capital and Regional Development (IPPR 1999), Venturing Forward : the role of venture capital policy in stimulating entrepreneurship, (IPPR 2000), “The future of the German Economy” (Manchester University Press, 2000), Why Invest in Biotechnology? Anglo-German Foundation 2003, and “Where is the East German Tiger?” Nationalstiftung, 2002 as well as numerous academic publications in the area of innovation management and systems, entrepreneurship and access to finance.  During her time at Deloitte she developed the Deloitte Competitiveness Index, a means of measuring economic growth potential through innovation and entrepreneurship. She is a contributing editor of the Business Strategy Review. Picture ©Sara Haq.