Sam Arnaout

Sam is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence / Associate Lecturer in Business within the Department of International Business, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at RMIT University’s School of Management.

 

Sam is an education-focused academic, entrepreneur and applied business educator with teaching experience across entrepreneurship, international business, business management, employment relations and cross-cultural management. Before stepping into this role, Sam taught at RMIT as a sessional academic, where his interest in applied business education developed into a clearer academic direction.

 

His teaching focuses on active, applied and authentic learning. He is interested in making the classroom more than a place where theory is repeated. His approach encourages students to question ideas, apply concepts, debate assumptions and build confidence in their own thinking.

Alongside his teaching, Sam brings more than 20 years of applied business experience across entrepreneurship, operations, stakeholder management, team leadership and venture development. He is the co-founder of HYYRO App, a circular-economy rental platform centred on access over ownership and the more effective use of underused resources. Through HYYRO, Sam has worked with technology teams, industry stakeholders, the entrepreneurship ecosystem and RMIT students through Work Integrated Learning projects.

 

Sam’s scholarly interests sit at the intersection of entrepreneurship education, circular economy, sustainability, design thinking, business technology and applied learning. He is particularly interested in how students learn entrepreneurship through practical, evidence-based, real-world experiences, and how circular economy thinking can be more meaningfully embedded in business education.

 

His emerging research direction includes circular platform business models, app-based entrepreneurship, regenerative approaches to business education, Work -Integrated-Learning, design-led research and action research. This direction connects with broader ideas such as Doughnut Economics, where business education is understood not only through commercial value creation, but also through social foundations, ecological limits and responsible innovation.