Professor Stephen Hagen was appointed Director of the Centre for Research, Innovation and Graduate Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2006 where he is responsible for managing the research and innovation strategy of the University and knowledge exchange and transfer.

Prior to this, Professor Hagen was Director of the Mercia Institute of Enterprise at the University of Warwick, the lead science enterprise centre for the ten West Midlands universities, specialising in enterprise creation, technology transfer and enterprise education. Prof Hagen has been the non-Executive director of four companies based at Warwick University where he was also Director of University’s CPD Office. Between 2001–2006 he was responsible for EnterpriseFest, the first regional enterprise festival in England; and Bizcom, the Business Ideas Competition, the first student business plan competition entered by over 600 students in the West Midlands.

In June 1996 Prof Hagen was awarded a Personal Chair for work in the field Applied Languages, specifically for his research on the use of languages in business on his appointment as Dean of the School of Languages and European Studies at Wolverhampton University.

Professor Hagen is currently taking the lead in England on DIFUSE, the 6th framework innovation project reviewing the metrics of entrepreneurship on six European campuses, a project established by the European Consortium of Innovative Universities, ECIU. He is also Principal Investigator working on a large-scale European survey of language needs in European business, ELAN, in association with the National Centre for Languages in London reviewing the foreign language needs of commerce and industry across 29 European countries.