Overview

Abdullah Gök is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the University of Exeter Business School. Abdullah is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR), Alliance Manchester Business School as well as the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research. Prior to joining the University of Exeter in January 2024, Abdullah held positions at the Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Before moving to the UK for his PhD in 2006, he worked at The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) as a policy researcher between 2003 and 2006.

Abdullah's research has appeared in various prestigious academic and non-academic outlets. Since January 2019, Abdullah is an Associate Editor of Technological Forecasting and Social Change and since October 2022, Abdullah has been serving as an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Data.

Abdullah has served in a number of EU and OECD advisory committees on data science and innovation and he is currently an elected Board Member of the European Network of Indicator Designers.

Abdullah's research spans the following areas of science and innovation policy and management.

• Social aspects of science, innovation, and entrepreneurship with an emphasis on social innovation and diversity
• Emerging technologies and their implications for business strategy and public policy
• Formulation, evaluation, and impact of science and innovation policy

Full list of publications:

• Google Scholar
• ORCID

Qualifications

• PhD in Management, Manchester (2010)
• MSc in Science and Technology Policy Studies, METU, Turkey (2006)
• BSc in Economics, METU, Turkey (2003)

Career

• University of Exeter Business School, University of Exeter (2024- ) 
• Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (2018-2023)
• Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester (2007-2018)
• The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (2003-2006)

Links

• Twitter Profile
• LinkedIn Profile

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Research

Research interests

Abdullah's research spans three inter-related areas of innovation management and policy.

First, he studies the social aspects of innovation. His research focuses social innovation, with a particular interest in how social innovation emerges and how established firms engage in social innovation. As part of the two large scale EU H2020 grants (KNOWMAK and RISIS 2), he develops the European Social Innovation Database (ESID) using text mining publicly available information on the web. This comprehensive database aims to form the definitive source of information for social innovation in Europe. He also works on the diversity in research, innovation and entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on how origin and gender diversity interact and creates a superdiversity.

Second, he studies emerging technologies and their implications for business strategy and public policy. He is interested in how emerging technologies are developed, governed and commercialised. He was involved in research projects studying: i) emergence and growth of graphene-based enterprises around the world, ii) University of Manchester’s commercialisation strategy for the Nobel level success in graphene research, iii) strategies of high growth green goods manufacturing enterprises in the UK, US and China, iv) science and innovation systems transition in China and Russia and vi) applications, expectations and concerns for synthetic biology. He was a Co-I of the £10m five-year synthetic biology research centre at Manchester, studying responsible research and innovation alongside life sciences colleagues.

His third research area relates to formulation, evaluation, and impact of enterprise and innovation policy. He studies how government intervention creates impact in supporting innovative businesses and how this impact is evaluated, particularly by employing an evolutionary view of innovation. He has been involved in a number of evaluations of innovation policies as well as large-scale projects that collect, analyse and conceptualise evaluations. He was a Co-I of the Compendium of Effectiveness of Innovation Policy project in which a large team synthesised the existing evidence on the effectiveness of business innovation support programmes. As an output of this project, he recently co-edited the authoritative Handbook of Innovation Policy Impact, which is currently being translated into Chinese.

Besides these three research areas, Abdullah is experienced in developing novel methodologies through data science. He has extensively used large-scale publication and patent analysis and advanced statistical analysis with existing data. Furthermore, he utilises data science in studying innovation by developing “big” and novel data collection and analysis methods, for instance to identify firms in certain sectors without the rigid industrial coding schemes and to study their innovation strategies from unstructured information in their websites. This research has already gained international recognition with well-cited methodological articles. As well as designing and co-ordinating an advanced PhD course on data science in studying innovation, he organised two international data science and innovation workshops that brought together the community of scholars working on this area. Furthermore, he co-organised a special session on data-driven innovation policy at the Royal Statistical Society Conference 2016.

Links

• ORCID List of Publications
• Google Scholar Profile

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Publications

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External Engagement and Impact

External positions

• Elected Member of the Board, European Network of Indicator Designers

Journal and book series Editorships and Editorial board membership

• Associate Editor, Technological Forecasting and Social Change
• Editorial Board Member, Scientific Data

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Teaching

Modules

2023/24

• BEMM118 - Strategic Innovation Management

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