Melissa Edwards

Melissa Edwards is a Director of the Executive MBA program at the UTS Business School. She researches and teaches about sustainability, sustainable enterprise and responsible management, complexity theory, and social impact. Her work draws across disciplines with an overarching aim to understand how people organise, learn and adapt to enable sustainable transitions.

She was a lead CI on the Australian Government Office of Learning and Teaching project to develop a Community of Practice to share excellence in Sustainability Education through an online platform (www.sustainability.edu.au), for which she was awarded a finalist in the Green Gown Awards for Excellence. She has led several cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary teams to embed sustainability into the business curriculum, including developing an innovative undergraduate course that challenged students to address contemporary wicked problems and design sustainable entrepreneurial solutions for which she received a University Teaching and Learning Citation. She currently chairs the UTS Business School cross-faculty Sustainability Working Party and is a UTS Sustainability Steering Committee member. She co-chaired the Sustainability and Social Issues in Management stream at the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management conference (2014-2018) and has collaborated to develop a stream of research regarding Sustainability in Management Education (SiME) at the prestigious Academy of Management Conference. She has developed a partnership with the world-leading Circular Economy advocacy organisation, the Ellen McArthur Foundation, to create a partnership as a network university. UTS was the first Australian University to host an online forum as part of the Disruptive Innovation Festival (DiF), a global initiative designed to bring together educators, innovators, practitioners, and students. She co-edited and contributed to two books on design-led innovation processes and facilitated applied courses through u.lab, including one with the City of Sydney, to develop community projects. She is currently teaching sustainability and responsible management in the postgraduate Business programs.

She conducts research that draws together sustainability, complexity, social capital, and network theories focusing on social impact and new business models, especially the Circular Economic and B Corps. She has worked as Chief Investigator on various research partnerships. She has published in peer-reviewed academic journals including Organization and Environment, Business Strategy and the Environment, Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Environmental Education Research Journal, Stanford Social Innovation Review and Voluntas. Outcomes from her recent projects include developing innovative social impact indicators for Surf Life Saving Australia, a managing hybrid organisations guidebook for nonprofit organisations and an evaluative framework comparing Australian and EU sustainable finance frameworks.