Mónica Edwards Schachter
Ample expertise as researcher, consultant and trainer in social innovation, cross-sectoral innovation, higher education, STEAM education. She is specialist in Innovation and Engineering Projects, holds Bachelor Degrees in Electronic Engineering and Science Education and a Phd (Cum laude) in Science Education with a pioneering dissertation on grand challenges and sustainability education (University of Valencia, Spain, 2003). Also PGDs in Knowledge Management, Transdisciplinary, and Design and planning of education projects. She is Member of the European School of Social Innovation (ESSI) since 2019.
Monica has participated as External Independent Evaluator at the European Commission in several programmes (last contributions in 2021 and 2022 in HORIZON-MSCA and HORIZON-EIE COST programmes, COST, 6i Dirs COFUND Project Call 2021Horizon), as well with other public and private organisations. She joined more than 30 research and consultancy contracts at national and international levels. She received two fellowship grants from the European Social Fund and the Spanish National Research Council (Post-Doctoral Programs Torres Quevedo and Jae-Doc).
From 2017 to 2019 was involved as associate consultant with Technopolis group in a contract with the Executive Agency for SMEs (EASME)/COSME (Social Business Initiative (SBI) follow up: Cooperation between social economy enterprises and traditional enterprises. European Commission). As part of the core team she developed the analytical framework, empirical design, strategy, implementation and policy recommendations in mapping cross-sectoral cooperation in social economy, circular and sharing economy in ten European countries and benchmarking in five non-European countries, the study of cooperation interactions in innovation ecosystems, including the role of social intra and extra-preneurs, incubators and accelerators, the analysis of clusters and co-creation in hybrid value chains, public and private procurement and trends in social enterprise and sustainable business models.
She has written more than one hundred publications, including books and papers in outstanding journals like Research Policy, Proceedings of IEEE, Review of Policy Research, among others. She received various prizes, like the IBM Award (Science in Action contest, 2012) with a game for scientific reasoning decision-making related to climate change and sustainability. In 2007 she was co-awarded in the Aula-TIC contest organized by the Expo e-learning Congress (Barcelona, Spain) for mobile applications to students’ assessment.