
Tsekouras George
Dr Tsekouras is Director of CENTRIM (Centre for Change, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management – Brighton Business School – University of Brighton). He has led research in the area of innovation management and entrepreneurship. He is the co-ordinator of the INSPIRE project which investigates best practices of Open Innovation in SMEs in order to support the professionalization of Open Innovation within SMEs (http://www.inspire-smes.eu).
George is also part of the SPARK consortium which looks into innovation in Social Enterprises (http://www.sparksocialenterprise.eu). He was the co-ordinator of the RAPPORT consortium (www.rapport-project.eu), which researched best practices to connect SMEs to universities or research and technology organisations (RTOs). He has also worked for a consortium (www.coachcom2020.eu/about) that helped the European Commission to develop the innovation coaching service for the SME Instrument scheme, a new EU programme to support innovation in SMEs. Dr Tsekouras is the founder of the Profitnet programme which has included a number of peer-to-peer learning networks in UK, Ireland and South Africa with the participation of more than 1,500 SMEs around the world. The last evaluation exercise of the British Government (REF – Research Excellence Framework) rated the Profitnet programme as an international leading case (www.brighton.ac.uk/business-and-community-partnerships/research-and-development/profitnet/index.aspx). Dr Tsekouras has worked in other areas like innovation benchmarking, industry forecasting and business process reengineering. He has a first degree in mechanical engineering and a DPhil from SPRU at University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of papers in academic journals, books and international conferences while he has designed and delivered many executives training and consulting programmes on entrepreneurship. Finally he is the Innovation Chair of the British Academy of Management (BAM), leading the Innovation Track in the BAM Conferences and the BAM Special Interest Group on Innovation.