Department of Strategy and Innovation

Mercedes Delgado is Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), and a Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She teaches strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship courses at the Master's and executive levels, and is the lead co-director of the MBA Entrepreneurship Concentration at CBS. Delgado’s research focuses on the relationship between the regional business environment and the performance of inventors, firms, regions, and countries. She examines the role of regional clusters—geographic concentrations of related industries, firms, and supporting institutions —in job creation, innovation, entrepreneurship, inclusivity, and resilience. Delgado has developed new methods for defining and mapping industry clusters and the supply chain economy. This work provides frameworks and tools to help firms, practitioners, and policymakers create regional and national innovation strategies. She is also interested in how to connect businesses in inner cities—economically distressed areas within a city— to their surrounding cities in order to facilitate inclusive prosperity. At the firm level, she studies the interaction between the spatial organization of firms, their location choices through the value chain, and performance. Her recent work explores the organizational and locational drivers of the inventor gender gap. Delgado’s work has been published in top economic, policy, strategy, and science journals. She has received several prestigious fellowships and research grants, including a graduate fellowship from Fundación Rafael del Pino and a recent National Science Foundation grant on Mapping the Inventor Gender Gap. She served as a lead researcher on the US Cluster Mapping Project: Mapping a Nation of Regional Clusters. Delgado has engaged with multiple stakeholders in innovation ecosystems: government, hundreds of startups, corporations, and accelerators. She serves as a mentor at AcexHealth (health accelerator in Andalucía) and is working with Digital Catapult (accelerator in the UK) to foster 5G innovation.

Delgado earned a PhD in Business Economics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy Group.