Rebecca Pates is a Director at SQW who joined the company in 2004. She specialises in innovation, finance and business-related interventions and place-based growth, with expertise in business case development, appraisal, evaluation and exploratory research across these fields. Her clients include central government departments, UKRI and Innovate UK, the British Business Bank, Combined Authorities and universities.

Rebecca's evaluation experience includes developing evaluation frameworks, formative, process evaluation, impact and economic evaluation. This includes evaluations of British Patient Capital and the Regional Investment Funds for the British Business Bank, the Transforming Food Production Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and Knowledge Transfer Partnerships for UKRI, the Investor Partnership Pilot for Innovate UK, the productivity grants scheme for Defra, and the Seed and Venture Capital scheme for the Department for Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Ireland. She has experience of RCT, quasi-experimental and theory-based methods.

Rebecca has extensive experience of place-based economic analysis and spatial development. This includes research into place-based impacts of R&D and innovation investment for UKRI. She also co-authored Independent Economic Reviews for the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands.