Mercedes is Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and Research Affiliate at 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 examines the role of industry 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, mapping, and assessing industry clusters and the supply chain economy. This work provides tools to help firms, practitioners, and policymakers design innovation strategies. In recent work, she explores the organizational and locational drivers of the inventor gender gap, developing frameworks, algorithms, and metrics to support the inclusion of women and minorities in innovation.
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. Delgado has engaged with multiple stakeholders in innovation systems: government, hundreds of startups, corporations, and accelerators. She serves as a mentor at AcexHealth (health accelerator in Andalucía) and is working with Digital Catapult to foster digital innovation.
Delgado holds an MA in Economics from Northwestern University and a PhD in Business Economics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy Group.
