Department of Strategy and Innovation

Mercedes Delgado is Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and Research Scientist at the MIT Innovation Initiative. She serves as Senior Institute Associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School. 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, providing tools to help firms, practitioners, and policymakers create regional and national strategies. In recent work she explores the interaction between firm location choices through the value chain and firm performance. Delgado’s work has been published in top economic, policy, and strategy journals. She has received a number of prestigious research fellowships and grants, including a PhD 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.