Dr. Tea Petrin

Tea Petrin is currently a full professor of economics and entrepreneurship at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana and has been a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Haas School of Business and the University of California at Berkeley. She was a Fulbright professor at the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley and at the Centre for Industrial Competitiveness in the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She was a guest lecturer at 18 universities in the United States, Europe and Japan. In Slovenia and former Yugoslavia, her papers and major works represent the very foundation of studies on small business and entrepreneurship and on active industrial policy. She holds MA degree form Louisiana University in New Orleans and PhD (Econ) from the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana..

In various roles, Dr. Petrin has acted as Advisor to public administration institutions and governments, mainly in Slovenia, but as well for multilateral institutions such as the FAO UN, UNDP/UNIDO, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Slovenian Agency for Restructuring and the Privatisation Fund, and the European Commission / DG Enterprise.

She is former Minister for Economic Affairs and later on Minister of the Economy within the Slovenian Government (1999-2004). During these years, she developed and implemented horizontal industrial policy conducive to enterprise reorganization and competitiveness within which the support to cluster development was among the most important policy measures. She was also an ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia to the Netherlands (2004-2008).

Dr. Petrin is the Vice-President of the Board of Advisors of The Competitiveness Institute and member of the jury preparing the award criteria and evaluating the applications received for the "Europe INNOVA Clusterpreneur of the Year 2006 Award". Recently she was an external evaluator of “Development of a Clustering Policy Project” in Turkey. She is a member of the EFER (European Foundation of Entrepreneurship Research) Academic Advisors Board currently the high-level-chair of the European Cluster Policy Group established by EC.

She has a Master's degree from Louisiana State University in New Orleans and a Doctorate in Economics from the Faculty of Economics in the University of Ljubljana.