Professor James Derbyshire
Professor
Biography
Professor James Derbyshire's career has seen him work in higher education, private-sector consulting and for government. Prior to joining University of Chester in 2023 he worked for eight years as a Senior Research Fellow at Middlesex University in a role that combined publishing academic journal papers, leading consulting projects for government, and leading grant bids and projects. He has also worked at Anglia Ruskin University (Research Fellow), at RAND Corporation (Senior Analyst on the Innovation & Technology Policy team), at Cambridge Econometrics (Senior Economist), at the European Commission (in what was DG Enterprise & Industry), and at the technology consultancy Capgemini (Analyst). Professor James Derbyshire has successfully secured external funding and has published widely in journals such as Risk Analysis, International Journal of Forecasting, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Technovation, Business History, Environment & Planning A, European Management Review, Applied Economics, Ecological Economics, Futures & Foresight Science, Futures, Local Economy and Journal of Business Venturing Insights.
Teaching and Supervision
Professor James Derbyshire either leads or contributes to a number of modules currently taught at Chester Business School, including Managing Innovation, Critical Perspectives on Sustainability, and the Business Research Methods module in which students plan their dissertations. He also teaches a masterclass on managing the uncertainty of innovation to MBA students and is supervisor for masters' dissertations. Professor James Derbyshire currently has four Dprof/PhD students.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Professor James Derbyshire's research interests coalesce around innovation and uncertainty management, with a particular focus on scenario-based approaches as an aid to decision-making under uncertainty. This research is both empirical and theoretical. For example, for Professor Derbyshire's paper in Technovation he analysed a dataset of 45,000 firms from across Europe to understand the effect of the innovation strategy known as ambidexterity on firm performance. In his other papers, such as those in Risk Analysis, Ecological Economics, International Journal of Forecasting and European Management Review, he sets out new methods for scenario planning, or discusses government policy in relation to risk and uncertainty management. For his PhD (completed in 2007), Professor Derbyshire examined the networks established by SMEs when innovating, relating different network configurations to different innovation outcomes using an agent-based model. Professor Derbyshire recently led a large project funded by the British Academy of Management, which examined the effect of scenario planning on the perception of uncertainty using Randomised Controlled Trials.