Dr. Eric Hansen
Dr. Eric R. Hansen is the President of the Economic Transformations Group. Dr. Hansen’s areas of expertise are economic competitiveness analysis, strategy development, and managing broad-based economic change and action implementation for regions and industries. He is a specialist in cluster-based economic development and is innovating procedures for stimulating private-sector development and public-private collaboration in a variety of socio-economic and cultural contexts. Dr. Hansen directed major economic strategy projects for South Africa, Texas, Pennsylvania, Panama, Guatemala, Morocco, and the States of Campeche, Chihuahua, and Tabasco in Mexico, as well as projects in Eastern Europe (Slovakia and Slovenia). He has directed a variety of competitiveness projects in the United States: Long Beach, California (business incubator design, university technology park development), Southern California (biotech research and training institute), Florida (new enterprise development), and Arizona, North Dakota, Iowa (cluster-based economic strategy).
Dr. Hansen was previously Director at DRI/McGraw-Hill and program manager of SRI International's Center for Economic Competitiveness where he led and worked on economic strategy projects in various U.S. states, Australia, India, Hong Kong, and Eastern Europe. Formerly, Dr. Hansen was with the World Bank, taught economics and planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and worked with the Iranian Plan and Budget Organization. He holds a BA in economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. in regional economics and planning from M.I.T. He is fluent in English, Spanish, and French, and has working knowledge in Portuguese and Farsi (Persian). He has authored numerous articles and publications, lectures frequently at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. He is Director of the Competitiveness Institute, the Cluster Practitioners Network, based in Barcelona, Spain (see www.competitiveness.org), and he is director of The Cluster Consortium, a joint US, New Zealand, South African company, established to carry out clustering projects in Africa. |