I'm a management scholar at RMIT in Melbourne. My research is about how firms and ventures strategize their scale, scope, and limits. The way I work starts by questioning a category the field treats as settled and asking what it has been hiding.
I grew up in Istanbul, where Europe meets Asia and the established meets the emerging. When you grow up in that position, you learn early that things rarely fit the categories other people have drawn for them. And "between-ness" becomes part of how you see things.
I began my academic career there as a researcher, then as a lecturer. The decision to do my PhD took me to Australia. Twelve years and three universities on, my research interests and experience have widened, but my approach has barely changed.
I started questioning how things get grouped together that have little in common, how ventures and firms can create value by refusing the dominant pathways, how the field uses concepts every day without anyone asking what they actually mean, and why so much of what we know stays inside academic journals when it could inform real decisions outside them. I'm drawn to the edges and the divergent actors, to what sits just outside the usual field of vision, because I think that's often where the real drivers of change are.
I teach Innovation Management and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems at RMIT, across campuses in Melbourne, Singapore, China, and Vietnam. I write essays for practitioners and policymakers because I think research that stays inside journals isn't really finished. And I'm always interested in collaborations with scholars, organisations, or policy actors working on the same questions from different angles.