Professor Kevin Hindle (BA Hons Div.1, MBA, CPA, PhD) is the CEO of Mentor Entrepreneurship Group (MENTREG). MENTREG is a consultancy that applies frameworks and tools developed in the peer-reviewed research of Kevin Hindle and a range of leading-edge scholars in the field of Entrepreneurship. This knowledge has been applied to create strong frameworks, proven approaches and sharp consulting tools honed to assist private organisations innovate profitably and government agencies help businesses and regions to become more innovative. Kevin is a consultant, researcher, teacher, venture founder and venture capital investor whose variety of expertise and interests embrace many aspects of managing in conditions of uncertainty. His research, teaching, managerial and consulting work focuses on building entrepreneurial capacity through understanding the relationships between innovation, entrepreneurial process and entrepreneurial context. This work embraces several areas: new venture evaluation; entrepreneurial business planning; market and financial modelling; change management; organisational design; corporate strategy and management training. Applying leading-edge research to practical problems, he has initiated and developed new ventures and worked for and consulted on entrepreneurship to organisations large and small, public and private, Australian and international. In a thirty-plus year career of consulting in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship Kevin has been the sole or a principal consultant in over 200 significant projects for major clients. Some of these projects are illustrated on this site.
Kevin’s consultancy is grounded in a long career as a management educator. He has developed curricula and taught courses in entrepreneurship and associated disciplines in a range of degree award and executive development programs throughout the world. He was the foundation designer of the Master of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Degree at Swinburne University, where he worked for 18 years, writing the initial version and many subsequent versions of ten of the twelve programs comprising that degree. He later headed the Centre for Entrepreneurship Innovation and Community at Deakin University. Some of the many organisations for whom he has taught and held visiting and adjunct professorships include: the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, Baylor University (Texas), INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), the University of Southern Denmark, EM Lyon Business School, University of Technology (Sydney), University of Adelaide. He is a seminal scholar in the field of Indigenous Entrepreneurship and, in honour of his pioneering work in this field, he was the inaugural visiting professor at the First Nations University of Canada (Regina, Saskatchewan).
Kevin is co-author of three textbooks and numerous monographs and articles on the teaching of entrepreneurship. His several professional awards include winning (in 2004) the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division and McGraw Hill Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award. This is a highly regarded honour for entrepreneurship education in the United States. Kevin is the first and only non-North American ever to win it. In the same year he won Australia’s highest entrepreneurship education award, the Business-Higher Education Round Table (B-Hert) Award for the Best Entrepreneurial Educator of the year. Kevin teaches innovation innovatively.
As a researcher, Kevin Hindle has authored over ninety publications including more than fifty peer-reviewed papers in a range of respected international journals, books and conference proceedings. Most are downloadable from this site. He is a theorist of entrepreneurial business planning, entrepreneurial process, and the role that contextual factors – particularly community factors – play in influencing successful entrepreneurial practice. From 2000 to 2007 he was Australian Project Director of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), the world’s largest longitudinal entrepreneurial research project. Beyond academia, Kevin Hindle has a successful track record as an entrepreneur in his own right and currently risks his own money backing his judgment as both a new venture founder and an independent private equity investor. He has a strong network of collaborations and personal friendships among leading entrepreneurship scholars and practitioners throughout the world and a track record of substantial fundraising for entrepreneurship research. He has consulted on entrepreneurship policy to both State and Federal governments in Australia and to several international universities, government organizations and corporations. Kevin was a ministerially appointed foundation member of both Australia’s National Innovation Awareness Council and the advisory board of the International Danish Entrepreneurship Academy (IDEA). The unifying theme of all his work is to develop and apply constructive, internationally relevant research whose findings can be used to enhance the education and enterprises of ethical entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial advisers and policy-makers.