Nkosana Mafico

• Lecturer in the Strategy Group
• Course Organiser:
  • Managing Across Borders and Cultures (Undergraduate)
  • Global Business and the Sustainable Development Goals (Undergraduate)
• Member (Research Champion)
  • Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability Committee

Nkosana investigates how cultural heritage shapes venturing and organising. He draws on a decade of experience as a founder, non-executive director, and educator to examine what happens when heritage crosses spatial and temporal boundaries.

He received his PhD from Monash University and was awarded the Mollie Holman Medal, a university-wide academic honour awarded annually to ten doctoral graduates for exceptional research. He also holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Queensland with first-class honours and was valedictorian at the business school.

His work is published in the Journal of Business Venturing and has earned three Best Conference Paper Awards from the European and American Academies of Management. Across three years at UEBS, he has received four Excellence in Teaching Awards, averaging 4.77/5. His teaching develops the judgement to harness and mitigate the influence of powerful institutions and technologies. That judgement is grounded in autonomy, cross-cultural intelligence, and critical thinking under uncertainty.

Previously, he co-founded Funetics, an English pronunciation software venture backed by Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company, leading business development across Beijing, San Francisco, and Singapore. He founded CYALA (the Council for Young Africans Living Abroad), a social enterprise tackling structural barriers to employment facing African youth in Australia, growing a 30-person team across four cities. He has also worked inside blockchain communities, providing governance and strategic support to emerging digital ventures.

Nkosana's governance work spans heritage, education, and public policy. He serves on the boards of:

• Historic Environment Scotland (HES): Governance of Scotland's cultural and natural heritage, including 300+ historic properties attracting over 5 million visitors annually. Chair of the People Committee (organisational culture, workforce strategy, senior leadership performance). Member of the Audit, Risk, and Assurance Committee.
• Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS): Strategic oversight of a Scottish Government agency distributing £1 billion annually to support 160,000+ students.

Past appointments include four years on the advisory council of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, three years on the Queensland Government Multicultural Advisory Council, and three years as Chair of the Global Shapers Community in Australia, an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

Organisation theory scholar investigating how cultural heritage shapes venturing and organising.

Cultural heritage is the experiences, beliefs, practices, and artefacts that individuals inherit or adopt from past and present communities. Nkosana's research examines what happens to venturing and organising when that heritage moves across space and time, organised in two streams: one following heritage across space, the other recovering it from the past.

Across Space: This stream examines how actors venture and organise with cultural heritage across geographical, sociocultural, and technological spaces. Projects explore how:

• African immigrant entrepreneurs leverage cultural heritage for new ventures, producing distinctive approaches to paradoxical tensions and a mirroring mechanism between personal and organisational hybridity
• Social class heritage shapes how entrepreneurs use reasoning orientations across national boundaries, producing upward, downward, and steady patterns of transnational social venturing
• Culturally inherited stereotypes between impact investors and social entrepreneurs distort evaluations of impact and worth, creating a social evaluation paradox in capital allocation
• Entrepreneurs use public blockchains to preserve, authenticate, and commercialise cultural heritage
• Indigenous entrepreneurs carry cultural heritage into financing systems built on assumptions that do not accommodate their traditions
• Female immigrant entrepreneurs navigate pathways shaped by intersecting cultural and gendered barriers across borders
• African American and African communities draw on different inherited understandings of cultural heritage into pan-African discourse, producing competing evaluations of belonging

Across Time: This stream recovers cultural heritage from historically distant and systematically excluded societies, asking whether they reveal approaches that contemporary frameworks for venturing and organising would benefit from. Projects explore how:

• Ancient societies developed cultural heritage around reasoning about competing demands, and recovering that heritage can inform how we address contemporary challenges

Phenomena: Immigrant and indigenous entrepreneurship, transnational venturing, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, heritage and belonging, blockchain markets, ancient traditions, indigenous knowledge systems.

Theoretical Interests: Organisational paradox, social evaluations (legitimacy, authenticity, status, stereotypes), cross-cultural psychology.

Methods: Grounded theory, narrative interviews, netnography, comparative case study, digital archival, computational text analysis, questionnaires, systematic review