Plenaries and President

Presidential Lecture: Sweden, Renewal through innovation and entrepreneurship?

Date, time & venue: Monday 10th June 16:15 – 17:30, Wallenbergsalen
Speaker: President of the Joseph A. Schumpeter Society, Maureen McKelvey

Professor McKelvey’s Presidential Lecture will focus on the ISS2024 conference theme of “Transformation: Creative Accumulation and Creative Destruction”, in terms of Renewal through Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Schumpeter proposed a dichotomy between change driven by large firms and small firms, with enduring lessons for understanding what drives industrial dynamics. Yet the transformation of today’s economy relies upon more complex, knowledge-intensive innovation ecosystems involving both large firms and entrepreneurs, and these transformation processes are experimental and also driven by networks and relationships. Her lecture will expound upon three challenges of governance in such innovation ecosystems, namely alignment of incentives and capabilities; balancing incentives to keep renewing the innovation commons; and reflections on how public policy can best support future options through firm capabilities & entrepreneurs. Maureen McKelvey will give her lecture, and then moderate a panel with experts active in business innovation and entrepreneurship.

Maureen McKelvey

Professor McKelvey is President of the Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. She is Professor of Industrial Management and Economics as well as Director of the Gothenburg U-GOT KIES centre, at the University of Gothenburg. Professor McKelvey leads the Swedish Research Council’s 10-year Distinguished Professors Program on Knowledge-intensive Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Transforming society through knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship (VR DNR 2017-03360). To strategically match this, the University initiated the Gothenburg U-GOT KIES centre. The three goals are to stimulate world-class research; to impact graduate education; and to promote societal impact and dialogue, within innovation and entrepreneurship. Therefore, the Gothenburg U-GOT KIES centre supports the ISS2024 conference, including members of the Organizing Committee.

Professor McKelvey’s research focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship processes, as related to the development and use of knowledge in the economy. She is well-known for her research on university-industry interactions, especially the concept of “academic engagement”; knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship and processes within science-technology-innovation ecosystems. Much of her career has been spent on examining such research questions in relation to advanced technologies, engineering, medicine, and science. More recently her research group has widened the scope, by looking into important, but relatively neglected areas, including creative industries, regenerative medicine and sports. 

Her publication strategy reflects a conviction that we have different audiences for our scientific expertise, leading to a divergent publication portfolio. In recent years, her publications include these journals: The Annals of Regional Science; Drug Discovery Today; Cambridge Journal of Economics; European Planning Studies; Industry & Innovation; Industrial and Corporate Change; Innovation: Organization & Management; Journal of Evolutionary Economics; Organization Science; Research Policy; Science and Public Policy and Small Business Economics. She also likes books, so she is active writing and editing books with academic publishers including Routledge, Oxford University Press (OUP), and Edward Elgar.

Professor McKelvey is, and has been active in impacting society, throughout her career. She recently served on the Growth Commission for an Inclusive and Sustainable Malmö, led by Professor Martin Andersson. She has also served as editor on several special issues of journals, and served on numerous boards, projects and councils, for OECD, European Union, Vinnova, DRUID, DIME, EAEPE and at universities like Imperial College and Stanford University (Scancor). She is currently a member of Advisory Board for Manchester Institute of Innovation Research and GEM, Grenoble Ecole de Management. Teaching and textbooks – such McKelvey and Lassen (2013) Managing Knowledge Intensive Entrepreneurship – are other ways to impact society more widely. She has led the development of three Masters of Science programs (Chalmers University of Technology: Management and Economics of Innovation (MEI)) and (University of Gothenburg: Innovation and Industrial Management (IIM) and Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship (KBE)).

The International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society awarded her the Schumpeter Prize in 1996 for: McKelvey, M. (1996). Evolutionary Innovations: The Business of Biotechnology. Oxford University Press. While Charles Edquist was her supervisor for her PhD thesis, Dick Nelson was the examiner, and they encouraged her to revise and submit the manuscript to OUP. This book lays out an evolutionary economics explanation of processes at the intersection of economics and science, which are shaped by entrepreneurs and firms to create innovations. Possibly, older members of the Society remember – and the rest will learn – that due to her receiving an unexpected phone call by the magazine Wirtschaftswoche informing her of the awarding of this prize and the next question being ”what will you do with the prize money?”, she answered ”buy a horse”. (She did). Luckily, Schumpeter was also an accomplished horse rider, so this made a good story. The Schumpeter Prize dinner in 1996 was organized at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, by then President Gunnar Eliasson.