Speaker: Rebecca Harding, CEO and founder of Delta Economics

There is not much that Rebecca doesn’t know about enterprise in the UK.  Rebecca is an independent economist, Founder and Managing Director of Delta Economics Ltd and the World Entrepreneur Society.  Until March 2007 she was Director of The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) UK, Executive Director of GEM worldwide.  In these roles she was also a Senior Fellow at London Business School.  Previously Rebecca was a Director of Research at Deloitte, Chief Economist at The Work Foundation and she has held senior academic roles at the University of Sussex (Science and Technology Policy Research Unit, SPRU) and the University of Brighton.  Additionally, she has been a senior researcher with the Institute for Public Policy Research.  Rebecca is a Director of the German British Forum. In June 2008 she was awarded the Prowess Women’s Enterprise Researcher of the Year award.
Rebecca has been a specialist adviser to the Treasury Select Committee on Regional Productivity between 2004 and 2005 and Chief Policy Adviser to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Entrepreneurship (APPGE) (2007-2009).  Recently she was engaged in round table discussions with the German President and senior business leaders and policy makers on the future of the East German economy (die Mueritzkreis). She has an extensive, international reputation for her research, as well as an international policy and business background is currently working for the new German government on Socially Responsible Investment.

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, 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 170 academic and policy articles and reports. Her recent media work includes appearances on Radio 4’s the Today programme, Woman’s Hour,  Radio 5 Live’s “Wake up to Money” and the World Service.  She is frequently cited in the Financial Times, the Telegraph and the Economist.