Robin Cowan is a Professor of Management at the University of Strasbourg and Professor of Economics at Maastricht University. Previously he worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario and New York University. He has held visiting positions at the Rotman School of Business, GREQAM (Marseille), GATE (Lyon), the Santa Fe Institute, and was a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. In 2004 he won one of 15 prestigious Chaires d'Excellence of the Ministry of research and Education in France, and in 2013 became a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

His broad research interests lie in the area of the economics of innovation, economics of science, particularly in middle income countries, and the use of network analysis to understand knowledge creation and diffusion.

His work has appeared in the Journal of Development Economics, Industrial and Corporate change, Research Policy, Socio-Economic Review, Economic Journal, and other similar reviews.