Professor Erkko Autio FBA FFASL is Chair in Technology Venturing and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London Business School.

Currently Erkko is working on the Wicked Acceleration Lab, a joint initiative between Imperial College Business School and Royal College of Arts that develops methods for Wicked Acceleration, DeepTech Acceleration and Moonshot Acceleration.

Erkko's work has been cited over 60 000 times in Google Scholar, and a recent Stanford University survey ranked him within the top 0,2% of the world's scientists in terms of research impact. In August 2024 he received the USC Helena Yli-Renko Research Impact Award, which is conferred to the most cited academic paper published in the field of entrepreneurship six years prior (in this case, during year 2018). He was a runner-up for the same award in 2007.

Erkko was a co-founder of the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute and co-author of the Global Entrepreneurship Index and the EU Regional Entrepreneurship Index. He was also a founding team member of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor GEM initiative -- the World's largest ongoing research consortium in social sciences that has been running since 1997.

Erkko has conducted pioneering research in digital entrepreneurship, scaling and scale-ups, comparative entrepreneurship, international entrepreneurship, innovation ecosystems, entrepreneurial ecosystems, business model innovation, and digital transformation. His research has been cited in hundreds of news media in over 80 countries (including The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, CNN, MSBNC, among others), and his research has been recognised with numerous best paper awards. He has also been recognised as one of the 50 most influential management scholars globally in terms of research impact (Aguinis et al, 2012). He is listed on Thomson Reuter's Essential Science Indicators top 1% most cited academics in Economics & Business worldwide and ranked among the top 0.2% of the World's scientists in any field in terms of research impact by Stanford University in 2024.