Welcome to my web page! I obtained my PhD in Business Economics in Spring 2020 in the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation (MSI) at KU Leuven under the supervision of Reinhilde Veugelers, in collaborating with Ashish Arora (Duke) and Bruno Cassiman (KU Leuven, IESE).

My PhD research focused on the economics of science, technology, and creativity: I analyzed how the experience and knowledge of inventors and startups shape their incentives and skills to develop novel and valuable technologies. My work combines insights from Economics of Innovation and Technological Change, econometric methods and patent analytics to develop new theory and evidence on issues relevant for business strategy and innovation policy. I am at home building all sorts of large databases, indicators and metrics.

Since 2021 I am a Data Science postdoc at SKEMA Business School and KU Leuven; in these projects I combine data science and software engineering to develop large, complex databases for entrepreneurship research. Also, during 2022 I worked as Data Science Consultant with AWS for Nemeon, a funky cloud-native startup around Antwerp.

In the more distant past... I earned a MSc in Business Economics and Quantitative Methods at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2013) and a BSc in Economics at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina (2010).

You can reach me at manuel.gigena@kuleuven.be or via LinkedIn.