Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research, Middlesex University

Dr James Derbyshire is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research at Middlesex University. Prior to taking up his post at Middlesex he worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Institute for International Management Practice at Anglia Ruskin University. Before he joined the Institute he worked for many years in consulting for organisations such as Capgemini, Cambridge Econometrics and RAND Corporation. He has a bachelor's degree in history from The University of Liverpool, an MBA from Durham University Business School and a PhD from The University of Liverpool. His PhD examined the networks established by firms when attempting to innovate and related their various network configurations to the level of innovativeness achieved by them.

His consultancy work has mainly focused on economic development. He managed a number of large-scale research projects for the European Commission while working for four years as a Senior Economist at Cambridge Econometrics. These included a project to estimate the capital stock for each region of the European Union for DG Regional Policy and a project to estimate the number of enterprises, number of employees, value-added, turnover, investment and wages and salaries in eight broad sectors for each EU Member State for DG Enterprise and Industry. Other organisations for which he has provided consultancy include the UK government, numerous local authorities, and private-sector firms such as General Motors Europe.

His research focus cuts across a number of fields and includes entrepreneurship, cluster measurement, innovation, regional development and economics, relationality and knowledge flows, demography, multi-agent modelling, scenario planning, and the philosophy and methods of social-science research.