Dr Abdullah Gok

Personal statement

Dr Abdullah Gök is a Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, Strathclyde Business School. Abdullah is also an Honarary 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 Strathclyde in June 2018, Abdullah was a Lecturer at 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's research spans three inter-related areas of innovation management and policy. First, 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 in Manchester, studying responsible research and innovation alongside life sciences colleagues.

His second 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.

He is currently developing a research programme on social innovation, with a particular interest in how social innovation emerges and how established firms engage in social innovation. He has recently been awarded two large-scale EU H2020 grants, as the PI, with which he is developing 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.

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.

Abdullah serves in a number of EU and OECD advisory committees on data science and innovation. Abdullah is an elected member of the University of Strathclyde Senate and its Discipline Committee. Abdullah also sits in the Open Reproducibility and Metrics Sub-Group of the University of Strathclyde Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee.

Abdullah holds a BSc in Economics and an MSc in Science and Technology Policy Studies from the METU, Turkey. He completed his PhD in December 2010 at the AMBS, University of Manchester.