School of Entrepreneurship & Business
Enterprise Fellowship Scheme: Members Bio
Dr Rebecca Harding
[Senior Enterprise Fellow]
Rebecca is Managing Partner of Delta Economics Ltd and Director of GEM UK. 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 and a Senior Fellow at London Business School. She is Director of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for the UK and in that capacity still holds a Senior Associate Fellowship at LBS. She advises the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Entrepreneurship and is a specialist adviser to the Treasury Select Committee on Regional Productivity, 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.
She has an extensive, international reputation for her research, as well as a policy and commercial background. Her specialisms include public policy and economic research, innovation management, venture capital, scientific entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and work organisation and productivity. She has advised the EU, Inter-trade Ireland, the UK and Danish governments and German regional governments on innovation and entrepreneurship and micro finance policy. Most recently she has sat on the academic panel advising the UK’s government innovation review, was a member of the Accounting for People Taskforce and is a member of the panel advising the government on effective allocation of its R&D budget in the run up to the 2004 Comprehensive Spending Review.
She was a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck Management School and is a Visiting Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Economic Systems Research in Jena, Germany. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an Association of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences Academician and a Director of the German-British Forum.
She is the author of nine books and over 150 academic and policy articles and reports and has been frequently quoted in the Financial Times, the Economist, the Times, the Observer and the Sunday Times. She has appeared more than once on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, the Westminster Hour, The World Tonight and You and Yours, on BBC Radio 5 Live; “Wake up to Money” and Financial World Tonight, on BBC Television and on CNN. Her measurement of entrepreneurial activity is now used as a key UK government productivity indicator.