Dr Joe Lane

Dr Joe Lane is a Lecturer in Strategy at Henley Business School. He holds a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics, where he subsequently worked before joining Henley in 2019. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is Programme Director for BSc in International Business and Management.

Joe is a module convenor at undergraduate level and on the Chartered Management Degree Apprenticeship programme. His areas of teaching expertise are in business strategy, management research, the history of innovation and business history.

Grants and Research Projects

His published research broadly focuses on patents, innovation and industrial clusters since the middle of the eighteenth century. Joe welcomes enquiries from PhD candidates in these or broader areas of business and economic history, and currently has two active research projects in specific areas:

• Industrial Clusters: Knowledge, Innovation and Sustainability in the UK: this research applies a historical perspective to the development of industrial clusters with a view to developing contemporary policy implications. It is launched from a book that Joe co-edited on industrial clusters, which was published by Routledge in July 2022.

• Historical Patents and nature of knowledge: this research stream focuses on building a new database of British patents from 1750-1945, and subjects them to machine-learning textual analysis techniques. The research aims to determine how the way in which patents were written over time helps us understand the patenting behaviours of individuals and firms over time as the knowledge-base for innovation changes.

Awards

• 2019 – ‘Coleman Prize’ for best thesis in Business History at ABH Conference
• 2019 – ‘Best Developmental Paper’ at British Academy of Management Conference