My research has been primarily concerned with new technology adoption and commercialization, innovation and skills, bridging the different literatures on technological innovation and human capital development. This work contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship and technological innovation, connected to human capital issues, by looking at how technology commercialization drives industrial development, while based on more sophisticated skills and on the ability to generate and absorb technology. Research has focused on the Portuguese case in an international context, tackling these issues in different ways. In this context, I will present a set of different results:
The work to be presented has made several important methodological contributions, including work using different datasets, contributing to the novel use of available data, through the combination of several datasets, or even through the use of mixed approaches combining quantitative and qualitative work, done through an interdisciplinary approach to the problems.
Joana Mendonça joined the Engineering and Management Department at IST/University of Lisbon as an assistant professor in January 2017, where she has been teaching courses on Entrepreneurship, Engineering Economics and Project Appraisal, to Undergraduates, Masters and PhDs students. She researches IN+, Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, where she leads the Laboratory of Technology Management and Policy. Her research focuses on processes of new technology commercialization, industrial development and in the role of skills and human capital in these processes. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Research Policy, Small Business Economics and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. She has been promoting cooperation with companies, having established joined work with companies in different sectors and locations in Portugal. Parallel to her research, she has followed and helped technology commercialization projects from students and other researchers. She is a Scientific Director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Partnership and a scientific coordinator at CEiiA.
During 2016, she was an assistant to the Minister for Economy for issues related to Innovation, Technology and Science. She was a guest lecturer at IST in 2013/14 and 2014/15, during which she lectured Technology-Based Entrepreneurship, Practice and Analysis of Public Policy and Advanced Topics in Public Policy Analysis. She won the Best Paper Award at IECER in 2015 with the paper Business Owners’ Educational Skills and Entrepreneurial Teams on Workers Wages: The Role of Business Owners Gender, co-authored with Filipa Madeira and Miguel Torres. In 2012, she integrated the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) network and contributed with research on technology adoption and industrial development. Between 2010 and 2012, she was a Deputy Director at the Directorate for Education and Science Statistics (DGEEC). In 2009-2010, she was an assistant to the Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education. She obtained her PhD in Engineering and Industrial Management at IST, University of Lisbon, in 2009. In 2008, she was invited researcher at ZEW (Centre for European Economic Research), maintaining this collaboration since. Before her PhD, she obtained a Master’s in Engineering Policy and Management of Technology and obtained her Diploma in Chemistry from Lisbon University. She was a researcher at Instituto Tecnológico e Nuclear, focusing on Solid State Chemistry, and made her diploma thesis at Bern University on Vitamin B12 Derivatives
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Email: egov@unu.edu