Professor Paul Noon OBE

Paul leads Coventry University's enterprise and innovation work following a successful career spanning over a quarter of a century with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), representing and promoting the best of British industry and technology across the globe.

His aim in his role as Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Enterprise and Innovation is to push forward the University's ambitious strategy for growth by building on current success and extending the reach of Coventry's business-focused research and commercial activities. Recent projects include developing services for the health sector and the Civil Service. Paul believes that creating the translational bridge between industry and academia supports better students, better research, and faster more sustainable growth in the economy. With responsibility for innovation across the University Group, Paul works with colleagues from all academic and professional services disciplines to build new products and services and develop ways of working to support growth and more impactful delivery.

Paul is Chair of the Corporation for Dudley College of Technology, a large comprehensive FE College in the Black Country. Paul is also a board member on several University subsidiary companies in addition to CyberOwl (an award-winning cybersecurity spinout) and Inocardia (a novel human-cell based assay for assessment of cardiovascular liability).

Paul's research interests include intellectual property right, foreign direct investment, and social media use for social science research. He achieved his PhD in September 2020.

Paul's experience, honed far and wide, from New Zealand to Damascus and Kinshasa to Bonn, has covered a vast range of social and economic policy areas, from agriculture to education. His diplomatic service career primarily focused on developing the UK's economic prosperity and working closely with many businesses of all sizes. Before joining the University, Paul was regional director of UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) West Midlands, where his leading role was to support local businesses to grow and develop their export markets and attract inward investment to the region. Paul is a devolution champion working collaboratively with the West Midlands Combined Authority and Midlands Engine to drive growth and prosperity.

Recent Publications

Noon, P. (2021). IP and China's growing technology leadership. In A. Jolly (Ed.) Winning with IP Managing high-growth intellectual property (pp. 84-91). Coventry: Novaro Publishing.
Noon, P., De Vita, G. and Appleyard, L. (2019), WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE IMPACT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS ON THE FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT LOCATION (COUNTRY) CHOICE? A REVIEW AND RESEARCH AGENDA. Journal of Economic Surveys, 33: 665-688. https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12292
Noon, P. (2019) The use of new social media tools to survey elite, hard to reach populations: a case study of corporate leaders in UK multinational enterprises. Under review