Isabelle De Voldere works as a senior economist at IDEA Consult. She has over 20 years of work experience in both academic and applied policy research and advice. Her work focuses on topics related to sectoral and regional competitiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, access to finance and socio-economic impact analysis. In the last 15 years she has developed a particular interest in advising on the socio-economic position of professional cultural and creative actors and creative ecosystems. She coordinated multiple projects commissioned by (regional, federal, European) authorities, intermediary organisations and sector representatives on finance, entrepreneurship, busines modelling, the impact of digitalisation. She contributed to policy evaluation and development in the area of cultural and creative sectors at both regional and European level.

Methodologically Isabelle has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research methods, the design of evaluation and impact frameworks, the organisation and analysis of larger scale online surveys, interviews and benchmarking, value chain and ecosystem analysis. She has led multiple impact and evaluation studies, where her expertise mainly concentrates on the analysis and evaluation of the catalytic and broader societal impact of institutions and programmes. Since 2015 Isabelle has been actively involved in action research programmes on social impact measurement led by the Sociale Innovatiefabriek (Flanders), where she coaches social enterprises in designing and implementing an impact monitoring system to support internal and external evaluation.

Isabelle can smoothly combine complex analysis with strong stakeholder and project management – also in projects involving multiple partners in an international setting – and translate strategic reflection and evaluation into relevant (policy) advice follow-up actions.

Isabelle obtained the degree of commercial engineer at Catholic University Leuven in 1996. Previous to her work at IDEA Consult, she has been researcher at the Vlerick Management School and Catholic University of Leuven (Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics).