Nicola Searle

Nicola Searle is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, specializing in the economics and management of intellectual property with a focus on trade secrets, creative industries, and the digital economy. She holds positions as Visiting Professor at Bologna University, Scholar at The IP Policy Institute at University of Akron, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Innovation Management Research, Birkbeck.

Her research focuses on intellectual property economics, particularly examining copyright and business models in the creative digital economy and investigating trade secrets, knowledge flows, and research security. Her work demonstrates the role of copyright in shoring up business models in digital media industries and analyzes the complex cybersecurity environment affecting trade secrets and confidential data.

Dr. Searle's research output shows a clear trend toward examining the intersection of trade secrets with data economy issues, particularly in agricultural and food sectors, university-industry collaboration, and AI implications for copyright. Her work bridges economics, law, and policy, with increasing emphasis on practical applications in knowledge transfer and research security.

• Thomas Edison Innovation Policy and Law Fellowship (2023-2024)
• UKRI Digital Economy Fellowship (2017-2022)
• Horowitz Foundation Grant
• Martinus Nijhoff Special Award

Dr. Searle actively supervises PhD students working on projects related to intellectual property in traditional Chinese crafts, creative innovation hubs, and film business analytics. She has served on numerous funding panels, reviewing over £80M in research funding, and regularly advises UK government bodies including the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's College of Experts and the UK Intellectual Property Office's Research Expert Advisory Group. She is also a member of the European Policy in Intellectual Property Association board and has served as an Expert Witness to Parliament.

She leads research projects on knowledge leakage in research ecosystems and has established the impact of intellectual property on innovation through her work at Goldsmiths, where she joined in 2015 after serving as a government economist at the UK Intellectual Property Office from 2013 to 2015.