Dr Robyn Klingler-Vidra

Biography

Dr Robyn Klingler-Vidra is Reader in Entrepreneurship and Sustainability at King’s Business School. She is the author of The Venture Capital State: The Silicon Valley Model in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Inclusive Innovation (with Alex Glennie and Courtney Savie Lawrence, Routledge, 2022).

Her research focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation, and venture capital and has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including International Affairs, New Political Economy and Regulation & Governance.

She has delivered executive education for the LSE, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Tel Aviv University and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and led international studies for the UN Development Programme.

Robyn obtained her BA in Political Science at the University of Michigan and her MSc and PhD in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research

• Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Economic Competitiveness
• Venture capital markets
• Political Economy of East Asia
• Inclusive Innovation
• Diffusion and Contextual Rationality
• Patient capital
• Comparative Capitalism

Robyn’s research focuses on government efforts to build venture capital markets as a means to promote innovation, economic growth, and development.

She is currently engaged in five major research projects:

1. investigating why and how the Silicon Valley venture capital policy model is adapted as it diffuses, with particular emphasis on the forms venture capital policies take in East Asia. Robyn has been researching this since 2010.
2. investigating East Asian governments' shift from supporting state-owned enterprises and conglomerates, to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups in the post-East Asian Financial Crisis.
3. exploring how the educational backgrounds of East Asian innovation policymakers are shaping the focus of national entrepreneurship promotion policies. 
4. developing a framework for assessing the 'external rate of return' of business activity across economic and social parameters.
5. continuing to explore venture capital and private equity, across the themes above, as a source of patient capital for innovation and development.

Teaching

PhD supervision

Robyn is interested in supervising PhD projects focused on topics closely-aligned with her areas of research.

Further details

See Robyn's research profile