I teach courses that I developed or co-developed in managing innovation, entrepreneurial opportunity, managing entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, and research methods at undergraduate and masters levels. I also supervise student dissertations at both levels and I set up the Business School’s research seminar series, which now runs most Wednesdays during all three academic semesters.
Prior to my employment at Roehampton, which I joined in 2012, I held a Readership in Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Westminster Business School, London, where I co-founded and edited the Westminster working paper series. At Westminster I also set up research discussion groups involving researchers in business strategy from Westminster Business School and Leeds University Business School. In teaching, I established and taught MBA courses in research methods and business projects and in managing innovation and entrepreneurship. I also taught a core MBA module in strategic management as part of a teaching team.
Between 2005 and 2010 I was a post-doctoral Research Councils UK Fellow in corporate governance at the University of Leeds Business School. At Leeds I taught entrepreneurship and innovation, strategic management, and research methods to doctoral, MBA and undergraduate students.
Prior to my academic career, I worked for over 22 years as a senior manager in investment banking (N.M. Rothschild) in London, Guernsey, and Singapore. I was also an executive director of treasury and corporate finance (Guthrie Singapore, L&M Group) in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Brunei, and Pakistan. As a corporate financier in Singapore I developed a lucrative expertise in the capital reconstruction of “penny stock” firms that remained publicly listed. I also acted as financial adviser for technology and non-technology ventures that sought to commercialize. I helped to publicly list, or gain a secondary listing for, many of these ventures on the first or second stock exchanges of bourses in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Philippines, London, and New York.
In 2000, I returned to Trinity College Cambridge- where I had been an Undergraduate 20 years previously- for full-time, doctoral research. My topic was the corporate governance of closely-controlled firms in South-east Asia. I began writing and publishing on the strategic development processes of mid-sized, family-controlled firms in this region that grew while remaining under the control of extended, ethnic Chinese families.
I graduated in May 2004 with a Doctorate in Management Studies from the University of Cambridge. The title of my Doctorate was: “Resistance and Persistence in the Corporate Governance of Family-controlled Enterprises: Cases from Singapore”.
My research has involved comparative studies of resource management and strategic development processes in challenge-based enterprises. These enterprises are motivated by economic, socio-cultural, cognitive, and/or physical challenges faced by their founders and stakeholders, whose continuing challenges inspire the development of particular adaptive skills and capabilities. I am interested in the ways in which creative actors in challenge-based enterprises are able to leverage their capabilities and networks to achieve goals that they have established because of their challenges. My current research advances this interest by exploring processes of opportunity creation among visually-impaired entrepreneurs in USA and among old and new EU member states.
In 2012 I was a Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship Research at Università di Cagliari, in Sardegna, Italy. I have been invited to present my research in EU and East Asian universities, in addition to conference and workshop presentations.
I continue to develop and disseminate my research from consulting activities with ventures engaged in novel technology fields. This professional engagement remains a constituent element of my research and teaching, and has given me rare knowledge of and access to important industries. For example, I have enjoyed a 20-year relationship with a technology-focused private equity firm, Gimv n.v., where I have contributed my research on developing under-valued Asian ventures in the firm’s investment decisions.
I continue to be engaged in three non-executive, consulting roles, as follows:
- Advisory Board Member of a crowd-funding platform & crypto-coin exchange,
- Non-executive Partner of a technology valuation start-up &
- Founding Board Director of a scientific R&D enterprise, based at the Cambridge Science Park, Cambridge UK, that is commercializing a recent breakthrough in High Temperature Superconductivity: <http://lausuperconductors.com>. The technology in this venture was discovered by its CEO and is being developed by scientists employed by the firm.
My consulting work in all three UK-based ventures is in advising on their strategic growth & corporate development as commercial entities. This work involves close, frequent interaction with scientists in various fields & advances my interest as a researcher in improving the lives of challenged entrepreneurs by helping them to increase the public impact of their enterprises. I have sought to achieve this objective by applying both positive and negative lessons from their processes of venture creation for the benefit of all entrepreneurs; and vice-versa.
I supervise six PhD students at various stages of their completion. I am Director of Studies for all of these students save for an inter-disciplinary student who followed me to Regent’s University London.
Most of my students are full time. My PhD supervisees are located in a wide range of topics in entrepreneurship, innovation management, and organisation studies. These topics currently or previously include: the nature and processes of creativity in a UK software services SME, managing innovation and systems integration in specialist defence SMEs in the UK, organisational theory and practice in the “Renewal and Reform” programme of the Church of England, the impact of organizational culture on knowledge management in Higher Education in Nigeria, and exploring dyadic business relationships among foreign MNE subsidiary firms in the emerging market of Indonesia. The PhD student in systems integration is sponsored by the Royal United Services Institute, while the two students, respectively, in SME creativity and business relationships among foreign MNE subsidiaries are full-time scholarship students. I have to date supervised six PhD students to completion, two of whom passed without corrections.
