Koenraad Debackere

Koenraad Debackere is a professor of Technology and Innovation Management & Policy at KU Leuven since 1995. He has degrees in engineering and business. He was a visiting doctoral student and Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at MIT Sloan School and obtained best paper awards from the TIM Division of the American Academy of Management, the Decision Sciences Institute and the International Association for the Management of Technology. In 2006 he was awarded the Prize for Scientific Excellence of the Belgian Entreprise Foundation (VBO). In 2007 he received an honorary professorship from the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex.

He is the managing director of KU Leuven Research & Development and chairman of the KU Leuven seed fund, Gemma Frisius. He is co-founder and chairman of Leuven.Inc, the innovation network of Leuven high-tech entrepreneurs. Since 2005, he is the general manager of KU Leuven. In 2015, he was appointed chairman of EIT Health e.V. --- a KIC of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.