The Road to Making Innovation Real

How an Entrepreneur Became an Innovation Leader

I moved to China in 1993 at the age of 23.

At the time, many people thought I was crazy. China was still difficult to understand from the outside, and for a young Australian from Perth, it was hardly the conventional career path. But that decision shaped everything that followed.

China taught me how to operate in complexity. It taught me how to adapt quickly, read markets, build trust, navigate uncertainty, and find opportunity in environments moving faster than most people could comprehend. I started in Shanxi Province, helping Australian and Chinese organisations build commercial links, before moving to Beijing to work with the Australian Embassy.

From there, I founded my own China advisory businesses, initially helping companies understand, enter and operate in the Chinese market. Those activities were later merged into what became a more substantial corporate advisory and investment banking firm. It was not a conventional exit, but it was an entrepreneurial transition: building something, consolidating it, and turning it into a larger platform with greater capability, reach, and credibility.

I then built, exited, rebuilt, and partnered in businesses across China and Australia. I managed investment vehicles and high-net-worth portfolios, advised on cross-border transactions, structured deals, supported market entry, and worked with boards, executives, investors, entrepreneurs, and government organisations across some of the world’s most dynamic markets.

Leading the merged business, I advised around 200 international companies on China market entry and facilitated circa A$500 million in capital raisings and transactions. My work included capital raisings, trade sales, takeovers, investment structuring, partner identification, due diligence, negotiations, and complex cross-border commercial arrangements.

One of my most memorable entrepreneurial lessons came from a Chinese high-net-worth client. I had been deeply involved in advising on a potential exit when he offered me a share of his return, should the exit materialise. The agreement was written on a napkin. The exit later completed, and my share became a significant outcome. I could have treated that return as mine alone, but I shared it with my business partners because it was the right thing to do. For me, entrepreneurship has never only been about the deal. It has also been about trust, fairness, loyalty, and the people you build with.

But my story is not only about transactions. It is also about entrepreneurship.

I have built companies for others, built companies of my own, and built companies in partnership with others. Along the way, I have experienced the entrepreneurial cycle first-hand: forming a joint venture, merging a business into a larger platform, navigating exits and part-exits, dealing with disappointments, reinventing myself, and achieving outcomes that delivered significant seven-figure returns. Each experience shaped my understanding of risk, timing, resilience, trust, value creation, and what it really takes to turn an opportunity into something real.

When I returned to Perth after 21 years living and working in China, I had to re-engineer myself again. The market had changed. I had changed. And I realised that creating value was no longer just about transactions. It was about helping organisations build the capability to innovate repeatedly.

That transition became the next chapter.

I shifted my focus from cross-border investment and market entry towards innovation management, capability-building, commercialisation, investment readiness, and ecosystem development. Rather than simply helping organisations access markets or capital, I became increasingly focused on helping them build the capability to create sustainable value for themselves.

Through companies I founded and led, I continued advising organisations on growth, market readiness, technology commercialisation, international engagement, strategic partnerships, and investment attractiveness. Through various capability-building programmes, I helped businesses become more capable, investable, and commercially ready.

These experiences taught me that innovation is rarely a straight line. It moves through uncertainty, friction, opportunity, relationships, timing, governance, and execution.

They also taught me that transitions are not always financial. Sometimes they are strategic transitions into the platforms, roles, relationships, and structures that better fit the scale and direction of the work ahead.

I believe I am now entering another of those transition points.

The next stage of my work is focused on helping organisations make innovation real by building the management capability, systems, governance, portfolios, and leadership discipline required to turn opportunity into value. It is also extending into what I believe will become the next major capability gap: how innovation ecosystems are built, operated, governed, measured, and improved.

As Founding Chair of the Australian Innovation Management Institute, I am helping advance innovation management as a professional discipline in Australia. As Chair of the Blak Angels Investment Network, I am helping build pathways for First Nations investors to drive intergenerational wealth creation, economic empowerment, and self-determination. As a member of the Western Australian Government Innovation Advisory Board, and Chair of its People and Skills Subcommittee, I contribute to the broader innovation capability agenda for Western Australia.

My doctoral research, my book Making Innovation Real, and my professional work all connect back to one central idea: innovation does not become real through ideas alone. It requires capability, discipline, governance, investment, execution, and people who know how to operate in uncertainty.

That is what my career has been about.

Not following a straight line, but a winding path—much like innovation itself.

Across China and Australia, and many other countries. Across capital, companies, technologies, markets, and ecosystems. Across success, failure, reinvention, and growth.

Looking back, there has been one consistent thread throughout my career. Whether building businesses, advising leaders, facilitating transactions, leading organisations, or advancing research and thought leadership in innovation, it has always been about recognising potential before others see it, navigating complexity with confidence, building trusted relationships, and helping worthwhile opportunities become real.