Professor of Innovation, Imperial College Business School, London, Distinguished Visiting Professor Lancaster University Management School, and Margaret Thatcher Professor Emeritus, Judge Business School University of Cambridge. Professor Hughes is a Life Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and a former Director of the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge and of the UK Innovation Research Centre (UK-IRC) a joint-venture between the Centre for Business Research and Imperial College Business School.
He was from 2000 - 2003 Director of the National Competitiveness Network of the Cambridge-MIT Institute. He has held Visiting Professorships in the USA, Japan, France and Australia. He is an internationally leading scholar and policy adviser on science, innovation and industrial policy and was from 2004-2014 a Member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. He has, with colleagues at Cambridge, Imperial and Bath carried out a long-term programme of surveys of academic interaction with external organisations covering around 40,000 academics in all disciplines in all UK universities. He also has extensive research experience spanning over 25 years in the conduct of periodic large-scale surveys of the UK SME population. He was a member of the Foresight Lead Expert Group for the recent review of the Future of UK Manufacturing and the follow up Report on Manufacturing Metrics. His research interests, on which he has published extensively, include industrial and technology policy; the measurement of innovation; the growth, innovation and financial and acquisition characteristics of business enterprise; the measurement and evaluation of industrial and business support policy; and the relationship between law and economics in the analysis of corporate organisation and performance.