Prof. Diane Holt holds the Chair in Entrepreneurship and is also the Director of the Centre of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Studies at Leeds University Business School in the UK. Diane has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers. She has over 5,000 citations in Google Scholar in areas such as the role of business in development, entrepreneurship, green supply-chain management, and sustainability discourse.
She has won external funding from the ESRC, NRF (South Africa), British Academy, British Council, Newton Fund, and Nuffield Foundation. She was the Principal Investigator on the ESRC-funded Trickle Out Africa Project, which considers the impact of social and environmental enterprises on poverty alleviation and sustainable development across the 19 countries of Southern and Eastern Africa. She also led the “South African PhD Partnering Network for Inclusive Growth through Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship” funded by South Africa’s NRF and the UK’s ESRC from November 2015 to November 2018, in partnership with the University of Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria, and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Other recent activities include contributions to the youth social entrepreneurship United Nations expert meeting in December 2018 and authoring their UNDESA report on Youth Entrepreneurship. From 2017–2020 she led a project exploring social innovations in subsistence marketplaces within smallholder women-led farms in Kenya. She also has ongoing work with Brazilian partners exploring value chains in riverine communities in the Amazon. She is a member of the ESRC & GCRF Peer Review College, a member of the British Council Newton Fund Social Science Panel, a Marie Curie expert reviewer, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
