Mercedes Delgado

Mercedes Delgado is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Research Director and Research Scientist of the MIT Innovation Initiative Lab for Innovation Science and Policy. Delgado also serves as Senior Associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.

Delgado’s research focuses on the relationship between the regional business environment and the performance of firms, regions, and countries. She examines the role of regional clusters—geographic concentrations of related industries, firms, and supporting institutions —in job creation, innovation, entrepreneurship, and resilience. Delgado has developed new methods for defining and mapping clusters, providing tools to help firms, practitioners, and policymakers create regional strategies. More broadly, she studies the determinants of national and regional competitiveness, seeking to understand how different components of the microeconomic and macroeconomic environment contribute to prosperity. In recent work she explores the interaction between the spatial organization of firms, their location choices through the value chain, and firm performance. She is also interested in how to best connect businesses in inner cities—economically distressed areas within a city— to their surrounding cities in order to facilitate inclusive prosperity.

Delgado’s work has been published in top economic, policy, and strategy journals. She has received a number of prestigious fellowships and research grants, and recently served as a lead researcher on the US Cluster Mapping Project: Mapping a Nation of Regional Clusters.

Delgado earned a PhD in Business Economics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Innovation Policy and the Economy Group.