Dr Katharina De Vita BA Hons, MSc, PhD, SFHEA
Faculty Head of Student Outcomes | Reader in Innovation
My profile
Biography
Dr Katharina De Vita is the Faculty Head of Student Outcomes for the Faculty of Business and Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is also a Reader in Innovation in the Department of Strategy, Enterprise & Sustainability. Katharina is co-director of the Innovation and Teaching Excellence Learning Lab (I-TELL) within the Faculty of Business and Law. She joined Manchester Metropolitan University in January 2024; taking up a role that allows her to combine her interests in academic leadership, the student experience and innovation management research.
Katharina previously worked at the Greenwich Business School where she provided strategic leadership on a wide range of initiatives promoting student success, including the development and enhancement of the curriculum and of university policies. At the departmental level, she was lead for Quality Assurance, Employability and the Vygo peer mentoring scheme. As a committee member of the Scholarship Excellence in Business Education (SEBE) group and lead for the Students as Peers Special Interest Group, she championed excellence in Teaching and Learning, for example contributing to the organisation of the yearly Learning and Teaching Festival. Katharina is Senior Fellow (SFHEA) and Certified Management & Business Educator (CMBE).
Katharina is member of the Board of The International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM) Special Interest Group for Teaching and Coaching and Governor of Barking and Dagenham College where she also sits on the Curriculum & Quality Committee. She was invited by the European Council for Business Education to speak at their conference on ‘Technology and Teaching: Reflections on a Post-pandemic Future’ and, as member of QAA’s student strategic advisory committee, contributed to national debates around topics such as degree classifications, essay mills and academic integrity. Katharina serves as external examiner at the University of Chichester.
Throughout Katharina’s career, she attracted funding from national and international sources for teaching, discipline-based research and consulting. In 2024, she has been awarded £300k in funding by The British Academy under the “ODA International Interdisciplinary Research Projects funding” scheme leading a project, entitled “Penang Living Lab for Advancing the Creative Economy (PLLACE)”. Her scholarly activity includes pedagogic research, discipline-based research in the field of innovation management, and active engagement with industry. Prior to joining the University of Greenwich, Katharina worked for 7 years at the University of Cambridge. During her time at the University of Cambridge, she was academic lead of an Innovate UK project. She also led an international project associated with a research grant from NEMODE, an initiative under the Research Councils UK’s Digital Economy research programme. Katharina served as panel member for Innovate UK assessing bids worth £30m in 2020. Katharina was guest editor for a R&D Management special issue and currently serves as guest editor for Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education.
Projects
Throughout Katharina’s career, she attracted funding from national and international sources for teaching, discipline-based research and consulting. Currently, she is working on the following four funded projects listed below:
Ongoing Funded Projects
- Principal Investigator (300k) - The British Academy, ODA International Interdisciplinary Research Projects funding scheme: “Penang Living Lab for Advancing the Creative Economy (PLLACE)”. (2024)
- Co-investigator (18k) - Imagination Lab Foundation: “Comparing Single and Multi-Modal Training on EDI”. (2024)
- Co-investigator (2k) - Scholarship Excellence in Business Education (SEBE) funding: “Artificial Intelligence and the Student Experience: A Case Study of the AI revolution in Higher Education and its Impact on Students’ Academic Lives”. (2024)
- Principal Investigator (2k) - Impact Development Fund + Networks and Urban Systems Centre fund, University of Greenwich: “Examining the role of technology in promoting student belonging and engagement”. (2023)
Teaching
Katharina gained international experience in module design and delivery across levels and modes of delivery. She has experience in supporting students as personal tutor, placement tutor, dissertation supervisor and PhD supervisor.
Current PhD students
- Entrepreneurial Ecosystems - Aaron Tan, University of Greenwich
- Strategy as a Practice - Steven Brown, University of Greenwich
Current UG and PG teaching
- Entrepreneurs, Business in a Globalised Society (Level 6), Manchester Metropolitan University
- Dissertation (Level 7), Manchester Metropolitan University
Invited Lectures
- Laurea University of Applied Science, Vantaa/Finland (online) (2022)
- Zhejiang University, Hangzhou/China (online) (2020, 2021)
- University of Cairo, Cairo/Egypt (in-person in the UK) (2019)
- Carlo Cattaneo University (LIUC), Castellanza/Italy (in-person) (2017, 2018)
Research outputs
Katharina De Vita has previously published work under her maiden name ‘Greve’. In addition to the below listed peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, her outputs include +10 conference papers, and 20 practitioner as well as policy-oriented reports, blogs, webinars and podcasts.
Peer-reviewed Journal Publications
Leminen, S., De Vita, K., Westerlund, M. and Ritala, P. (2023). “Places and Spaces of Collaborative R&D and Innovation: Navigating the role of physical and virtual contexts”. R&D Management.
Nie, W., De Vita, K., Masood, T. (2023). “An ontology for defining and characterizing Demonstration Environments”. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, pp.1-21.
De Vita, K. and De Vita, R. (2021). “Expect the unexpected: Investigating co-creation projects in a Living Lab”.Technology Innovation Management Review. 11(9/10), pp. 6-20.
Greve, K. and Tan, A. (2021). “Reimagining the role of technology in higher education: The new normal and learners’ likes”. Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching. 14(3).
Greve, K., De Vita, R., Leminen, S., and Westerlund, M. (2021). “Living Labs: From niche to mainstream innovation management”. Sustainability, 13(2), pp. 791-816.
Greve, K., Leminen, S., De Vita, R. and Westerlund, M. (2020). “Unveiling the diversity of scholarly debate on living labs: A bibliometric approach”. International Journal of Innovation Management, 24(08).
Joncourt, S., Gebauer, H., Reynoso, J., Cabrera M., K. V., Valdes, A. and Greve, K. (2019) “Extending the Base-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) Concept“. Service Science Journal, 11(3), pp. 241-261.
Book chapters
De Vita, K., Wang, M., Tan, L., von Schomberg, L., and Lawlor-Morrison, N. (accepted for publication – publication in 2024)“The influence of technology on student engagement and belonging: A study of Chinese students in the UK” in Marginson, S. and Zuoyu, Z. (eds.) Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: A practical textbook for education practitioners. Springer.
Greve, K., Jonas, J., Moeslein, K. and Neely, A. (2020) “Unlocking unique value through co-creation in open laboratories” in Fritzsche, A., Jonas, J. M., Roth, A. and Moeslein, K. (eds.) Innovating in the Open Lab: The new potential for interactive value creation across organizational boundaries. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 81-91.