Dave is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Innovative and Entrepreneurship and was recently nominated by the University to apply for the Advance HE, National Teaching Fellowship scheme in 2026.
It’s been an honour and a surprise to be shortlisted for a National Teaching Fellowship.
Candidly, I’ve always felt like an odd fit as an academic. I had a 16-year professional career before becoming an academic and I struggle reading academic papers let alone writing them.
However, I have always self-identified as an educator, I love teaching and coaching, and I have a deep belief in the transformative power of what I teach.
From the outset of the CfIE I have advocated for an experiential-learning oriented approach, embracing challenge-based, team-based learning approaches. That emphasis has led, through collaboration with some amazing colleagues, to our novel Equity-Share peer-marking approach, our pioneering approach to Agile Research Ethics, and my own EEUK-funded research into developing a toolkit for embedding Threshold Concepts into Entrepreneurship Education.
As one of two initial Entrepreneurship Teaching Fellows in the CfIE in 2016 (alongside Sam Crawley) I developed the Year 3 Venture-Creation unit that serves as the key transition from solving ‘other people’s problems’ (i.e. client or challenge briefs) to ‘finding a problem worth solving’ (i.e. creating a new venture from scratch). This has evolved over time and now forms part of the offering on all our PGT programmes, and it has also morphed into service-teaching offerings in Engineering, Life Sciences, and Modern Languages among others. This effectuation-led, student-centred approach is one of the cornerstones of the multi-award-winning CfIE programme.
In 2025 the CfIE won the inaugural national AGCAS Academic Employability Award for Authentic Assessment, and we were the runner-up in the global ACEEU Best Entrepreneurship Course for delivering outstanding employability and entrepreneurship outcomes. As the CfIE lead on Employability, and the principal author since inception of the CfIE’s entrepreneurship units and PGT programmes I have played a significant role in these team awards. The CfIE Innovation degrees have won 4 National Awards and 1 Global Runner-up Award since 2018, a period in which I was the Postgraduate Programme Director and grew the Masters cohort more than 3000% from 6 to 180.
Whilst the CfIE degree programmes have grown from 40 students to over 600 in 9 years I’ve had a greater reach through the Bristol Futures: Innovation and Enterprise open online course which has been taken by more than 15,000 students and externals, and for which I was the lead educator.
My work in developing a suite of entrepreneurial venture-creation units at CfIE led to my recruitment as the lead educator for the ARC Accelerator, which attracted £3.9M from AHRC and ESRC in 2023 and has worked with 600+ academics from >100 research organisations since then in what is the UK’s biggest programme of supporting academic commercialisation from the Arts and Social Sciences. This programme uses the tools and methods of entrepreneurship education but the language of social purpose impact to help academics who “don’t do commercialisation” to do just that, creating sustainable impacts from their research.
For me, helping people to achieve impacts at scale is the thing I’d love to be recognised for.
All the best for you Dave. I was impressed by your ability to teach brilliantly. Years later, I still hold onto tips learned from you.