Maria Savona

Maria Savona is Professor of Innovation and Evolutionary Economics, University of Sussex, Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) and Professor of Applied Economics at the Department of Economics and Finance at LUISS University, Rome. She has been Honorary Research Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK, and Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Lille 1, France. She is an economist and holds a Laurea in Economics cum laude from the Department of Economics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (BA), and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from SPRU.

She co-leads for SPRU a H2020 on PILLARS (Pathways to Inclusive Labour Markets) grant (2021-2023); she leads tender for the Greater London Authority on Fixing the broken link between productivity and wages; she has led a Joseph Rowntree Foundation grant on The Local Distribution of Productivity Gains: Heterogenous effects (LODGE); a UK Economic and Social Research Council grant, on Technical change, employment & inequality. A spatial analysis of households & plant data (TEMPIS); and SPRU contribution to the H2020 Innovation-Fuelled, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (ISIGrowth). She has co-led a joint SPRU-IDS project funded by the IDRC on Pathways of Structural Change and Inclusive Development.

She has advised and produced commissioned reports for the European Commission (DG CONNECT and DG EMPLOYMENT); the IADB, Inter-American Development Bank; ECLAC, United Nation Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean; UN ESCAP, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific; OECD; NESTA, UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts; BIS, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; DETI, Irish Department of Trade and Industry. She has delivered keynotes on global structural change and the economics of innovation in services at the UCL School of Slavonic Studies, London; Universities of Berlin, Bremen, Jena, Strasbourg; Accademia dei Lincei, Rome; Inter-American Development Bank, Bogota, Colombia; the Economic Commission Latin American Countries (ECLAC); Max Planck Institute of Economics; Seville (Institute Prospective Technology Studies) and several others.

More recently, she has been invited in ‘Thought Leadership’ expert panels by the EC, the UK Department of Industry and Trade, the UKRI, ECLAC, UNDESA, EY, EC JRC, NESTA, Microsoft and Aspen Institute, OECD and Wolskwagen Foundation.

She has designed, launched and directed the MSc in Innovation for International Sustainable Development (now Sustainable Development) at SPRU.