Neil Pollock

Head of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation academic group

Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

Neil Pollock is a Professor of Innovation and Social Informatics and Head of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

Neil joined the University of Edinburgh Business School in 2001. He previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Newcastle and completed his PhD at Lancaster University in 1998. He holds a BSc in Computing (Portsmouth) and a MSc in Science Policy (Sussex). Before commencing his academic career, Neil served in the Royal Air Force. 

Neil teaches courses on digital innovation and has also served (several times) as the Director of the University of Edinburgh Business School's Doctoral Programme. 

Neil currently works on digital futures, digital innovation, and digital entrepreneurship, and his research sits at the intersection between the disciplines of Information Systems, Organisation Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. His books include Putting the University Online, Software and Organisations, How Industry Analysts Shape the Digital Future, and the edited collections Thinking Infrastructures and Market Studies. He is working on a further book entitled After Hype: The Business of Taming the Digital Economy, which will be published by Cambridge University Press next year.

He has been the principal investigator (PI) on many Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) projects, including a prestigious 2-year ESRC fellowship on the 'Social Study of the Information Technology Marketplace'. He has previously uncovered and theorised new forms of market expertise - influencer relations - through the ESRC project 'ranking the rankers'. He was most recently PI on an ESRC project on digital startups: the Second Most Important Pitch, which addresses an evaluation hurdle that plays a major but unacknowledged role in the growth and scaling of new digital ventures. See the following publications - From Pitching to Briefing and The Valorising Pitch.

Neil has begun a new research project with Luciana D'Adderio, Andrea Mennicken, Marian Gatzweiler, and Matteo Ronzani to study the emergence of the artificial insurance (AI) assurance industry. This project studies the assurance instruments created and used to evaluate AI for harms and risks. We will focus on the construction and use of these instruments in depth, analysing how they are influenced by visions and practices from more established assurance domains. The visions and practices we study come from areas like financial auditing (the 'audit ideal'). The instruments we examine include manual efforts to assess these harms and risks and attempts to automate some or all of this assurance process.

Having conducted one of the first ethnographic studies of software development, including carrying out the first participant observation study of the German software giant SAP, Neil is one of the pioneers of the Biography of Artefacts and Practices (BoAP) approach. BoAP is an extended process theory initially developed to study the enterprise resource planning systems used by large firms but is now being further developed to capture the construction and evolution of algorithmic and artificial intelligence systems. See the following articles: Biography of an algorithm, Method matters in the social study of technology and Moving beyond the single site implementation study.

He has co-organised the annual PhD Colloquium of the European Group of Organisation Studies (EGOS) for the last five years. He was a co-organiser of the 2023 Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop (IMSW), which ran in Edinburgh on the topic of Market Futures - Future Markets. He co-founded the ‘Innovation in Information Infrastructures’ (III) conference (now in its 7th edition). He is deputy editor-in-chief at the journal Information and Organisation and on the editorial board of Accounting, Organisations and Society and Organization Studies. The European Group of Organization Studies recently awarded him the 2022 James G. March Prize for his co-authored article ‘The Biography of an Algorithm’. He received a 2023 best paper award for his co-authored article 'Figuring Out IT Markets' in Information and Organization. In 2023, he was recognised as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. 

• Science and Technology Studies
• Economic Sociology
• Information Systems
• Market Studies
• Performativity
• Rankings and rating
• Digital Innovation/disruption
• Industry analysts and analyst relations