Henry Varga, a Swedish national, has over 15 years of experience evaluating and advising on public business, research and innovation policies and systems at local, regional, inter-regional, national and at European level and has authored numerous reports in the field. He has managed, coordinated and participated in a number of EU funded projects and supervised European network activities. Since 2013, Henry has been focusing on economic development and innovation, eco-innovation and circular economy.

At the European Commission (DG for Research) he contributed to the analysis, development and implementation of policies aimed at increasing the level of investment in research to 3% of GDP across the EU; and supported the work to evaluate the Swedish research, development and innovation policies. During his time at Technopolis Group Belgium (2005-2006), he contributed to the Swedish Country Report on Strategic Evaluation on Innovation and the Knowledge Based Economy in relation to the Structural and Cohesion Funds, for the programming period 2007-2013 and analysed research polices in general. Working as a policy advisor for COCERAL in 2012, he evaluated the proposal for a new EU Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) and its potential impact on members’ business and prepared position papers for the malting industry in on-going Free Trade Agreements negotiations between the EU and third-party countries. In 2012 he analysed the Slovak Draft National Strategic Reference Framework and the Slovak Draft Strategic Report at the European Commission (DG for Regional and Urban Policy). While living in the UK, he advised Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council on their economic growth and innovation strategy. Together with Alasdair Reid, Henry evaluated the Nordic Cooperation Programme for business & innovation for the Nordic Council of Ministers (2016). He was a member of the team for a number of Horizon 2020 funded projects: Online S3 (www.onlineS3.eu) aimed at developing an online platform of tools to support smart specialisation strategy (S3) design and implementation; and European e-infrastructure Services Gateway (www.eInfraCentral.eu) where he also was an interim project manager. In 2018, Henry was invited as an external expert at the CIRC4Life Innovation Camp 2018 (H2020 funded project) on Circular Business Models (CBM). During 2019-2020 he worked as an EU project coordinator ay the Technical University of Delft, supporting the successful implementation of Horizon 2020 funded projects.