Speakers Day 2: 29 June 2010
Dr James Cunningham, Centre for Innovation and Structural Change, NUI Galway
Dr James Cunningham is the Director of Centre for Innovation and Structural Change and is a senior lecturer in Strategic Management at the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics, NUI Galway. He previously held the positions as the Executive MBA Programme Director and the Head of the Strategy Group.
His main research interests focus on commercialisation, technology transfer, academic entrepreneurships and strategy as practice. His research on technology transfer has been cited in the Government’s major strategy document entitled, Strategy for Science Innovation and Technology published in 2006.
His co-authored book entitled the Strategic Management of Technology Transfer: A New Challenge on Campus was described in a Business and Finance review as “This book should be part of the policy library our entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and top manager in ICT and R&D oriented sectors.”
Currently, he is co-principal investigator of a major national study of principal investigators of publicly funded research project which is being supported by Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences RDI Grant and in collaboration with Paul O’Reilly, Dublin Institute of Technology and Professor Vincent Mangemetin, Grenoble School of Management in France.
Judith McKnight, School of Management, Queen's University Belfast
Judith McKnight is a final year PhD student in the School of Management, Queen’s University Belfast. She has a first class honours degree from the same university in Business Management. Her thesis explores the relationship between network structure and firm innovation within a high and low technology sector.
Dr Lawrence Dooley, Department of Management and Marketing, University College Cork
Dr Lawrence Dooley is a College Lecturer in Enterprise and Innovation at University College Cork. Prior to joining UCC, he was based at the Centre for Enterprise Management in the University of Dundee, Scotland. His core research interests focus on organisational innovation and issues related to inter-enterprise collaboration and venture creation. Other related interests include portfolio management and knowledge exchange.
Dr Maeve Henchion, Food Market Research Unit, Teagasc
Dr Maeve Henchion is Head of the Food Marketing Research Programme at the Ashtown Food Research Centre, Teagasc, where she has worked for the past 14 years. Currently, she is the Irish project leader in an EU FP7 project that examines SMEs within networks and the impact of this on innovation performance She recently led a nationally funded research project that examined the Irish food innovation system, with a specific focus on researcher-industry interaction.
Other research interests relate to consumer acceptance of novel food technologies, new (food) product development and sustainable food consumption. Her research is published in several international journals and she has presented at many European conferences. She currently has 30 peer reviewed scientific publications.
She has also been an academic reviewer for several international journals in the food marketing and food science field. Prior to taking up her current position, she worked as a research assistant at University College Dublin, where she was awarded her PhD for a study, which examined the performance of the Irish beef industry.
Patricia McHugh, Centre for Innovation and Structureal Change, NUI Galway
Patricia McHugh joined the Centre for Innovation & Structural Change as a recipient of a PhD Studentship in 2008. Her research examines the development of sustainable knowledge indicators for innovation policy, through the application of social marketing to science outreach activities in Ireland. Patricia received her B.Comm from NUI, Galway in 2006.
She was awarded the title University Scholar for high academic achievement in her second year of the BComm. Patricia received her MBS in Marketing from NUI, Galway in 2007. She was awarded two prestigious marketing fellowships from Thermo King Ireland and NUI Galway for achieving first place in the Marketing Specialisation of the BComm Degree.
Professor Björn Asheim, CIRCLE, Lund University, Sweden
Since 2001 Professor Björn Asheim has been the chair in economic geography at the Department of Human Geography, University of Lund, Sweden. He also a co-founder and deputy director of CIRCLE (Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy), a multidisciplinary centre of excellence in innovation research at Lund University.
He is also a visiting Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth and a part-time professor at the Centre for Innovation and Work Life Research at University of Agder, Norway. Professor Asheim is also a member of the International Scientific Panel of the Centre for Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Enterprise (KITE), Newcastle University.
He was previously a Professor in human geography at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography and a Professor at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, both in the University of Oslo, Norway.
He is the representative of Lund University in DIME (Dynamics of Institutions and Markets in Europe), funded by the EU’s 6th framework programme. He has been a member of the international advisory committee of two major Canadian research projects on Clusters and Regional Development (2001-2005) and on The Social Dynamics of Economic Performance: Innovation and Creativity in City-Regions (2006-2010).
He was editor of Economic Geography (2000-2006) and Regional Studies (2003-2005) and is a member of the editorial boards of Economic Geography, Journal of Economic Geography and European Planning Studies.
Professor Petra Ahrweiler, Innovation Research Unit, University College Dublin
Petra Ahrweiler is Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, Director of UCD´s newly established Innovation Research Unit (IRU), and a permanent Research Affiliate of the Engineering Systems Division, MIT, USA.
She studied law, sociology, journalism and political science at the University of Hamburg finishing with her PhD in the area of science and technology studies at the Free University Berlin where she was supported by the German National Merit Foundation.
Since her habilitation thesis at the University of Bielefeld on social simulation of innovation processes she worked as a Heisenberg Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG and as a Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Hamburg where she built up a new research programme on innovation research.
Petra has long experience as principal investigator and co-ordinator of international projects on innovation networks, e.g. the EU projects on Simulating Self-Organising Innovation Networks (SEIN) and on Network Models, Governance, and R&D Collaboration Networks (NEMO). She holds various research awards and is a member of various advisory boards in both governmental and academic organisations.
Dr Satyasiba Das, Centre for Innovation and Structural Change, NUI Galway
Dr Satyasiba Das graduated with an MSc in Geography (Remote Sensing & GIS) from Utkal University, India. He also received an MPhil in Development Study (Social Change) from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway and a dr.philos in Economic Geography from the same university.
He worked as a Development Planner for many international organisations in India (2001-2003) and as a researcher for social studies in industries at SINTEF Technology and Society, Norway (2004-07). He is also formally collaborated with Institute for Studies in Innovation Research and Education (NIFUSTEP), Oslo, Norway.
Since July 2007 he has been working as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Innovation & Structural Change, NUI Galway on an EU funded transfer of knowledge project, LUCERNA.
His research interest include development planning, spatial economic analysis, regional perspective of knowledge spillovers and innovation, and renewable energy. He has published in the fields of spatial econometrics, industrial dynamics and policy analysis and presented at various international conferences.
Dr Majella Giblin, Centre for Innovation and Structural Change, NUI Galway
Dr Majella Giblin was awarded a Royal Irish Academy (RIA) postdoctoral mobility grant in 2010 to conduct a comparative study of the medical devices sector in Boston, Massachusetts and in Ireland. Her research interests include regional industrial clusters, innovation systems, regional competitive advantage, inter-organisational relationships and business networks.
In 2008, Majella received a Government of Ireland IRCHSS (Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences) Postdoctoral Fellowship for her research in the area of industrial clusters. She has published three peer-reviewed journal articles, three book chapters and has presented fourteen papers at international and national conferences.
She has been invited to present her research at the ESRI (Economic Social Research Institute), NIRSA (National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis) and ERC (Employment Research Centre) at Trinity College Dublin.
Majella has built a strong research record having worked on a wide range of projects, including the OECD National Innovation Systems Programme and the OECD Sectoral Case Studies in Innovation project.
Peter Robbins, The Innovation Foundation, NovaUCD
Peter Robbins is one of Ireland’s foremost experts in innovation and new product and service development. Until recently, he was the global head of innovation excellence for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) where he was responsible for creating the worldwide, new product launches for Lucozade, Aquafresh, Sensodyne, Panadol, Ribena, alli and NiQuitin.
Peter was also responsible for creating a common global approach to innovation within GSK and this role involved designing and delivering significant internal training programmes with various stakeholders within the organisation, including the R&D commuity.
Peter now runs the Innovation Foundation, located at NovaUCD, an agency that specialises in creating, incubating and implementing new business ideas for clients. The Innovation Foundation works closely with companies to create promising new ideas for their business; to determine which are the most promising ones and to develop a framework for translating raw ideas into commercial assets.
Peter also works with Government agencies to create innovation teams and develop in-house expertise in organisations in the areas of idea generation; idea incubation and, ultimately, implementation and launch.
Peter lectures in SME programmes for the IMI, is a part-time lecturer in innovation in DCU and is a visiting lecturer in NUI Galway and UCD.
Peter has trained in the renowned Stanford D School, he is a graduate of London’s What-if creativity programme and is currently completing a PhD on the topic of Innovation Teams.