Leadership team

Colin McLeod

Colin McLeod headshot
Professor Colin McLeod

Colin McLeod is the inaugural Executive Director of the Melbourne Entrepreneurial Centre.

Colin is a Professor in the Melbourne Business School where has been the Program Director of the Master of Entrepreneurship degree and the Academic Director of the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship since 2015. He was awarded the title of Enterprise Professor in 2016 in recognition of his contribution to industry and academia.

Colin has a long-standing interest in entrepreneurship. He co-founded his first business in 1992, which expanded to a national company with almost 200 employees, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Haas School of Business in 1995/96 during the first 'Internet Boom' (and crash!) and completed a PhD in 1998 that identified some of the key factors that lead to the successful commercialisation of innovation. He has also been a Senior Associate of the Judge School of Business at the University of Cambridge.

In 2007, Colin and colleagues at the University of Melbourne were amongst the first researchers in the world to look at co-production with customers as a source of innovation. Their research was published in the highly ranked Journal of Retailing and has been cited over 800 times by other researchers.

Colin continues to have an interest in the commercialisation of innovation, and he contributed a section called “From Innovation to Entrepreneurship,” to a recent book by Danny Samson and Marianne Gloet titled Innovation and Entrepreneurship and published in 2016 by Oxford University Press.

He is currently a Director/Investor/Co-founder of six early stage companies in retail technology, online training, wireless technology, employee management, aged care and wearable biotechnology. All these companies started in Melbourne and have raised venture capital in the US and Australia, and have expanded to offices in Silicon Valley, Berlin and Manchester with partner operations in India, Malaysia and Uganda.

Colin was a member of the Executive Committee that raised almost $200 million to construct the Olivia Newton-John Cancer & Wellness Centre at the Austin Hospital and is a member of the AFL Research Board.