In his frontier market research and teaching, Tim excavates the huge potential of frontier markets in making rapid socioeconomic progress, if done right. He draws on extensive fieldwork in studying the emergence of Kenya’s Silicon Savannah and urban informal economies. Tim has developed a new module at Imperial, “Shaping Frontier Markets,” that has been “highly commended” by the Financial Times and regularly leads MBA student excursions to Nairobi, Kenya. You can learn more about Tim’s work by listening to this and this podcast episode.

His work on the social effects of entrepreneurship seeks to further the study of adverse and unintended consequences of entrepreneurship on society. Here, he investigates crime and misconduct in Silicon Valley startups, the adverse consequence of experimentation by entrepreneurial organizations on its own users, and how field experiments can engender unintended consequences.

Tim has been awarded the prestigious Aboyeji Medal for Servant Leadership by the Harambeans. He is a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Network for Technology and Entrepreneurship Research in African Societies (learn more by listening to this podcast episode). He is also the editor of the hugely successful open-access book Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making (Palgrave, 2017) which ranked among the top 5 most downloaded open access publications at Palgrave Macmillan.

Before joining the faculty at Imperial College, Tim was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Work, Technology & Organization in Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering Department. He holds a Doctorate and Master’s degree from a start-up academic institution, Zeppelin University in Germany, and a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from the University of Vienna.

For potential PhD students and Postdoctoral fellows: Tim’s new lines of research focus on (1) the unintended consequences of climate mitigation and adaptation efforts in frontier markets, and (2) vaccine research and production in Kenya. Specifically, the effect of voluntary carbon markets and clean tech entrepreneurs on rural citizens (e.g., pastoral communities, subsistence farmers and/or rural villages) is of key interest, and the role that business can play in establishing sustainable vaccine R&D and production in Kenya. Aspiring PhD students and Postdoctoral fellows are encouraged to get in touch.