Prof. Uwe Cantner
Prof. Uwe Cantner has been a member of the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation since December 2015. He became chair of the Commission in May 2019.
He holds the chair of Economics/Microeconomics at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Furthermore, he is Professor of Economics at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. Uwe Cantner taught as visiting professor at the Collegio Carlo Albert in Turin, Italy, as well as at various universities in France.
He was and is head of several committees such as the Joseph A. Schumpeter Society, which he headed in 2013/2014 and is now its Secretary General. From 2005 to 2011, he was deputy head of the Governing Boards of the DIME EU Network of Excellence (Dynamics of Institutions and Markets in Europe). He was chairman of the scientific advisory board of the Halle Institute of Economic Research (IWH) from 2012 to 2016.
Uwe Cantner is member of the scientific commission of the Mannheim Innovation Panel at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Director of the Jena Graduate School “Human Behaviour in Social and Economic Change”, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the “Schumpeter Centre for the Study of Social and Economic Change”.
Uwe Cantner is editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics and co-editor of numerous other publications. To date, he has published six books and more than hundred scientific essays in international journals.
He studied at the universities of Augsburg and Detroit, earned his doctorate at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and qualified as a professor at the University of Augsburg.
His research focuses on innovation economics in the fields of entrepreneurship and start-ups, clusters, networks and transfers, industrial dynamics, radical and transformative change, science and higher education, indicators, and research and innovation policy.
Caroline Paunov
Caroline serves as the Head of Secretariat for the OECD Working Party on Innovation and Technology Policy (TIP) within the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation. In this capacity, she acts as policy advisor and oversees the collaborative activities of more than 100 country policy delegates and experts.
Caroline’s current focus spans three key areas. She leads TIP policy research on frontier technology ecosystem initiatives, including those promoting sustainability, and how they can best support growth and diffusion. She also steers the TIP’s work on distributional challenges of technological progress in digital and environmental transitions. A cross-cutting theme of her research regards enhancing policy agility. As part of these efforts, she leads a comprehensive OECD assessment commissioned by the UK government, to develop policy recommendations to optimise .
Caroline has an extensive track record in innovation and technology policy, with over 70 publications, in addition to widely cited academic papers published in leading journals. She also has extensive convening experience, with over 100 international events on record. Her academic journey encompasses a B.A. and M.A. (Hons) from the University of Oxford, an M.Sc. from the University Pompeu Fabra, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of London.
