Fransman, Martin

MARTIN FRANSMAN
PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND FOUNDER-DIRECTOR
INSTITUTE FOR JAPANESE-EUROPEAN TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

He has written widely on entrepreneurship and innovation, companies, high-tech industry, science and technology, the financial services sector, and the economics of developing countries. Currently, a good deal of his research is on entrepreneurship and innovation, telecommunications, including broadband and next-generation mobile communications, as well as on the financial services sector.

His book, Global Broadband Battles: Why the US and Europe Lag while Asia Leads - which explains the development of broadband in the US, Japan, Korea, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and China – was published by Stanford University Press in March 2006. His other books include Telecoms in the Internet Age: From Boom to Bust to ...?, (Oxford University Press, September 2002) that won the Wadsworth Prize in Business History in 2003 for the best book published in the UK in business history in 2002; Visions of Innovation: The Firm and Japan (Oxford University Press, 1999); Japan's Computer and Communications Industry: The Evolution of Industrial Giants and Global Competitiveness (Oxford University Press, 1995); The Market and Beyond. Cooperation and Competition in Information Technology in the Japanese System (Cambridge University Press, 1990) that won the 1991 Masayoshi Ohira Prize, and Technology and Economic Development (Wheatsheaf, 1986).

His BA degree in economics was from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where he was also awarded his MA in economics with distinction. His PhD in development economics was awarded by the University of Sussex in Britain. He taught economics at the University of London before joining the University of Edinburgh in 1978. He was appointed to a Chair in Economics at Edinburgh University in 1996. He has been Visiting Professor at a number of universities, including the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), University of Tokyo, where he held the NTT Chair in Telecommunications; the Department of Industrial Economics and Management at Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden; the University of Nice in France; and the University of Turin in Italy.

Professor Fransman has worked with leading international and national firms in the areas of innovation, telecommunications, high-tech industry, and financial services and with numerous international organisations and governments.