Peter Sheldrake

Peter Sheldrake is currently based in the USA. He is an adjunct at Wake Forest University, where he teaches innovation and commercialization. Until recently he was an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, where he had been Professor of Business Entrepreneurship for 14 years, prior to retiring in 2011. In that role he was responsible for developing research and teaching in innovation and entrepreneurship, global business, and business strategy and leadership.

Peter Sheldrake had the opportunity to work in a variety of areas. He commenced his working life as an academic, first as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Cambridge, then Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and finally an Associate Professor at the Flinders University of South Australia. After ten years he joined the Shell Company of Australia as Senior Development Adviser, before being recruited to the Commonwealth Government’s Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs. He worked there for 6 years, eventually as Director. He then ran his own consultancy company before being appointed CEO of the Australian Institute of Management in 1988, where he stayed for just over nine years, before returning to the academic world and joining RMIT.

He developed and conducted executive education courses and undertaken consulting assignments with companies and small businesses and not-for-profits in the USA, Australia and South East Asia, as well as teaching university postgraduate courses. His areas of interest included innovation and entrepreneurship (especially intrapreneurship and corporate venturing), global business, leadership, strategy, scenario analysis, working with arts organisations and introducing senior executives to philosophy. Current consulting and development activity includes working with companies in the IT, pharmaceutical, hospitality and finance industries.

Peter Sheldrake has a BA, MA and MSc, from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from RMIT. He has written over 100 articles, and co-authored five books: Looking at Innovation, Medical Education in Australia, Design for Adversity, Accountability in Higher Education, and Inclusive leadership. He is the sole author of four books: Ronin and Revolutionaries, The Ronin Age, How Shall I Live?, and in 2014, Elephants on Roller Skates. He has recently started writing murder mysteries.

He has served on boards in the private, government and not-for-profit sectors for more than thirty years. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He is a director of Urban Forum, a Malaysian company running various programs in Malaysia, Singapore, China, Thailand, Indonesia, India and the Middle East.

An Australian, Peter Sheldrake was born in the UK, and lived with his wife in Winston Salem NC. They have six adult children, all currently living in Australia.