Felicia Fai

Felicia Fai is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Bath, affiliated with the Management Strategy & Organisation department. She holds roles in the Centre for Governance, Regulation and Industrial Strategy, the Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, and the Institute of Sustainability and Climate Change. Her research focuses on technological capabilities, regional innovation ecosystems, and policy frameworks for economic development. She is particularly interested in how regional capabilities can drive innovation beyond traditional industry classifications.

• PhD: Corporate Technological Competence (University of Reading, 1999)
• MA: International Business (University of Reading, 1994)
• BA: Applied Economics (Ulster University, 1993)

Her research explores corporate technological competence, regional innovation networks, and the role of universities as anchor institutions. Recent projects include studies on coworking spaces' impact on regional development, smart specialisation strategies for lagging regions, and the UK's Industrial Strategy. She has advised the Cabinet Office on regional growth policies and served as an external examiner for postgraduate programs at Birkbeck and the University of Strathclyde.

Her work contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals by addressing innovation-driven economic growth and regional inequality reduction. She actively supervises doctoral students interested in competence-based technological innovation and networks.

Key grants include projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, focusing on topics such as regional innovation ecosystems and the potential of coworking spaces for levelling up regional economies.

Her research outputs highlight themes like the role of policy in regional development, the contemporary relevance of classical economic theories to modern workspaces, and the temporal effects of R&D subsidies on innovation outcomes.