Carlota Perez

As international consultant, she has worked for various multilateral organizations, including the OECD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNESCO, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the Andean Pact and the World Bank. She has also acted as consultant for major corporations (including IBM, Ericsson, Telefónica, Cisco, Sogeti, ING Bank and the cooperative Mondragon), industry associations, ministries and councils of industry, Science and Technology, R&D institutes and development banks in many countries in Latin America and in other regions (notably Canada, Norway and Estonia). Several elements of the European Union's Lisbon Strategy were based on her work, and in 2015 she was Chair of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Expert Group for Green Growth and Jobs.

Perez is currently Honorary Professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) at University College London; Honorary Professor at SPRU, University of Sussex; and Adjunct Professor of Technology and Socio-Economic Development at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTEch), Tallinn, Estonia. She is also the Academic-in-Residence at Anthemis UK. From 2013 to 2016 she was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Prior to that she was affiliated to CERF (Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance) and the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. She regularly gives visiting lectures at other universities around the world.

Since the 2010s Perez has been studying the historical role of the state in previous revolutions bringing about such golden ages as the Victorian boom, the Belle Epoque and the Post War prosperity. She has identified the importance of giving directionality to the technological potential installed in the early decades of each revolution and of the role of changing lifestyles in creating new employment. She now proposes that the direction should be smart, green, fair and global growth to unleash a global sustainable golden age of the information revolution

In her 2002 book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital Carlota Perez explains her theory about techno-economic paradigm shifts that revolve around technology revolution, technical innovation, economy and finance, and society. Techno-economic paradigm shifts are brought upon by the technological revolution. Perez defines technological revolution as a powerful and highly visible cluster of new and dynamic technologies, products, and industries capable of bringing about an upheaval in the whole fabric of the economy and propelling a long-term upsurge of development. Every time a technological revolution takes place a massive replacement of one set of technologies by another also occurs. It can be a substitution through modernizations of existing equipment, processes, and ways of operation. Every technological revolution included changes in people, in the way organizations were run and what new skills were needed, each technological revolution was breaking old habits.

In 2000 Perez co-founded The Other Canon, a center and network for heterodox economics research, with - amongst others - main founder and executive chairman Erik Reinert. Having collaborated with Mariana Mazzucato for the past decade, she was the founding Honorary Professor at Mazzucato's new Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL, England, where she does research and gives lectures in the Master's of Public Administration programmes.

Carlota Perez is a neo-Schumpeterian and Christopher Freeman was her mentor and husband, with whom she closely collaborated. Her articles, from the early 1980s, have contributed to the present understanding of the relationship between basic innovations, technical and institutional change, and economic development. Her 2002 book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital has had a very positive response from academics as well as from the financial and the technology-based business communities. It has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. The book has contributed to a Schumpeterian understanding of the link between innovation and financial dynamics. In it Perez, speaking from 2002, lays out a history of five technological revolutions that follow a similar pattern of bang, bust and, hopefully, renewal.

Her career began at the Central University of Venezuela where she studied the structural causes of the energy crisis in the mid-1970s and then in the civil service at the Institute of Foreign Trade in relation to the technology aspects of the North-South Dialogue (1975–1977). As founding Director of Technology in the Ministry of Industry (1980–1983), she established the first venture capital agency, FINTEC. She has been consultant to most of the major public and private companies in Venezuela, in particular to INTEVEP, the Research and Development affiliate of PDVSA, the national petroleum company.

Carlota Perez (Spanish: Carlota Pérez; born September 20, 1939, in Caracas) is a British-Venezuelan scholar specialized in technology and socio-economic development. She researches the concept of Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts and the theory of great surges, a further development of Schumpeter's work on Kondratieff waves. In 2012 she was awarded the Silver Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation and in 2021 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Utrecht University.