Born in London, and brought up in Essex on the River Thames estuary, Hervey Gibson worked his gap year doing operational research for local government before studying economics at the new Lancaster University.
His career after graduation began in the chemical industry in North West England and Sweden, first as a mathematician, then economist, then as a marketing and general manager. He returned to economics as Director of the User Service for the Cambridge Growth Project of the Nobel laureate Sir Richard Stone. In this role he became founding managing director of Cambridge Econometrics (CE), a highly successful university spin-off company. As well as pioneering bottom-up industry-based analysis and forecasting of the UK economy, CE played a significant role in the first ‘3e’ (Energy-Economy-Environment) modelling of the European economy.
He then moved to Scotland and became Head of Business Environment for the British National Oil Corporation, privatised as Britoil. When the company was sold to BP, he established a European office for a small US investment banking company, engaged in international energy industry merger and acquisition work. Hired back to Scotland, he became Head of Economics for the Scottish Development Agency, and its successor body Scottish Enterprise.
He saw the mission as to keep the project work of the agency in intimate contact with its economic context. Arising from this, two particular projects at the agency in 1990-92 led to the foundation of Cogent Strategies International Ltd (cogentsi) in 1993. These were CAOS, the Competitive Advantage of Scotland, and EcTech. CAOS was the first rigorous application of the ‘cluster’ analysis of Michael Porter below the level of the sovereign state). Ec/Tech was a comparison of ‘regional science and technology policies’ in their context in five jurisdictions – Lower Saxony, Scotland, British Columbia, Brittany, and Valencia – and thus one of the earliest analyses of what would now be called regional innovation systems.
After its foundation cogentsi developed an extensive practice advising government and regional agencies on the development of economic activity within their sphere, and industry on market, regional and policy issues which may affect it. Two distinguishing strengths are understanding the two-way interactions between industry and the economy in many dimensions and at all levels, from the global to the local; and a close familiarity with economic measurement, and the issues surrounding data sources and their use. Relevant to Pascal’s current interests were a number of competitive benchmarking studies using a development of the methodology in (Padmore, Schuetze, & Gibson, Modeling systems of innovation 1: an enterprise-centered view, 1998), and the (ongoing) development of DREAM®, a Detailed Regional Economic Accounting Model, which breaks down national accounts industrially and regionally.
Cogentsi has completed more than 250 projects. In government several of these have motivated or supported significant policy changes, some affecting £ billion of government revenues or expenditure, some justifying about-turns at Cabinet level, and some providing the evidence base for major policy statements and white papers. In business and economic development they have motivated important innovatory organisation building, including new companies, new research and innovation institutions, technology transfer facilities, and restructured development agencies. Cogentsi has worked with several bodies of this type to draft their first strategies. Cogentsi is the only Scottish approved contractor to the UK Office for National Statistics.
Hervey was a visiting Professor and, for a short time, Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University. He is currently responsible for Economic Statistics on Scotstat, the supervisory board for official statistics in Scotland, is a member of the national panel of consultants to the Scottish Government on economic statistics and contributes annually to the Scottish Input Output tables. He was compiler of the Caledonian Blue Book, a compendium of Scottish national accounts from 1950 to 1995, and is currently working on a new edition. He wrote on various Scandinavian economies for the Economist Intelligence Unit over more than a decade.. In addition, Hervey was an international research advisor to two successive five-year Canadian SSHRC/NRC projects of the Innovation Systems Research Network, one on clusters and innovation and one on the social influence on the economic dynamism of cities. He has been a columnist and remains an occasional contributor to the Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper.
