Dr. Timothy Hor
Details
College: School of Management
Department: Management
Campus: City Campus Australia
timothy.hor@rmit.edu.au
ORCID: 0000-0003-4272-5379
Open to
- Industry Projects
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
About
I am a computer scientist by training, a digital business builder by experience, and a design scientist by discipline. I bring more than 30 years of experience across Southeast Asia, the United States, and Australia to my work in entrepreneurship, innovation, and business education.
My career has taken me from teaching technical communications at the National University of Singapore to founding ventures and leading digital businesses, including iProperty Malaysia, JobsDB Malaysia, and digital transformation at The Star. I have raised venture capital three times and experienced business growth, acquisition, and closure. These experiences shape the questions I bring to academia: What is worth building? How do we know? And how do we take responsibility for what we create?
I returned to academia in 2020 and completed my PhD in Entrepreneurship at Queensland University of Technology in 2024, receiving the Executive Dean’s Commendation for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis. My research used design science to develop practical knowledge for digital ventures raising capital beyond the seed stage. It subsequently informed the co-authored book Startup Fundraising Decoded and RaiiSE, a fundraising methodology and companion tool for founders.
At RMIT’s School of Management, I teach and develop entrepreneurship and innovation courses across undergraduate, MBA, and executive MBA programs. I am also the creator of augmenti, a multi-agent AI coaching platform that supports design thinking and venture development.
My guiding principle is Human at the Helm: technology generates; people decide, verify, and take responsibility. I believe entrepreneurship education should develop entrepreneurial humans—people capable of questioning assumptions, exercising judgement, and acting with love, courage, and purpose. For me, business is a relationship, and its value lies in what it contributes to people, communities, and the world we share.
Research fields
- 350704 Entrepreneurship
- 390303 Higher education
- 390103 Economics, business and management curriculum and pedagogy
UN sustainable development goals
- 4 Quality Education
- 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Academic positions
- Lecturer
- University of Newcastle Australia
- Newcastle Business School
- Newcastle, Australia
- 10 Feb 2024 – 27 Jun 2025
- Sessional Academic
- Queensland University of Technology
- School of Management
- Brisbane, Australia
- 1 Feb 2023 – 1 Dec 2023
Supervisor projects
- Regenerative energy commons as value networking modelling of just transition in decentralized mobile energy systems
- 17 Aug 2026
- Project 2: Blitz Change – A Team Challenge in Organizations
- 17 Apr 2026
Teaching interests
I design and teach entrepreneurship, innovation, and business intelligence across undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive education. My teaching draws on experience at QUT, the University of Newcastle, and RMIT, combining scholarly foundations with the realities of building and leading businesses.
At RMIT, my teaching and curriculum development span New Venture Creation, Applied Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking, Digital Entrepreneurship, Technology Futures, and Product Innovation. I have redesigned Building AI-Native Products and Ventures for delivery in 2027. Previously, I designed and coordinated Strategic Business Intelligence at QUT and co-founded the University of Newcastle’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Academy.
My teaching philosophy centres on authentic, reflective, and responsible learning. Students interview customers, test assumptions, develop prototypes, engage with industry mentors, and explain how evidence changes their decisions. Through augmenti, they work with AI agents while retaining responsibility for the direction and quality of their work.
I make students’ judgement visible through reflective portfolios, Human–AI Partnership Logs, and Attribution Audits. These practices ask students to explain what they accepted, modified, or rejected from AI-generated outputs—and why.
Across all RMIT courses I have taught for which results are available, my Course Experience Survey scores have consistently exceeded 4.5 out of 5. My goal is to equip students to think critically, create thoughtfully, and act responsibly in situations where neither the problem nor the answer is clear.
Research interests
My research examines how people and organisations design entrepreneurial responses to uncertainty and change, particularly as AI reshapes innovation, decision-making, and professional work. I work primarily through Design Science Research, developing and evaluating principles, frameworks, and tools that connect scholarly knowledge with practical action.
My research interests encompass four connected areas:
- Entrepreneurial judgement and venture development: How founders recognise opportunities, acquire resources, and decide what constitutes sufficient evidence, readiness, and growth. This includes post-seed fundraising, opportunity development from environmental change, and the design of sustainable and diverse entrepreneurial ecosystems.
- Human–AI collaboration and augmented innovation: How people and AI agents share the work of inquiry, problem framing, ideation, and evaluation while preserving human agency and accountability. My Augmented Double Diamond framework and augmenti platform provide foundations for this work.
- AI and the transformation of organisations and professions: How generative AI changes the capabilities businesses sell, the value they create, and the ways business schools and professions respond. I also examine AI bias and unequal access to mechanisms for correcting AI-generated errors.
- Entrepreneurship education and responsible innovation: How learning experiences develop judgement and the capacity to act under uncertainty, and how design science can support regenerative entrepreneurship and organisational change.
My work has appeared in Technovation, Research-Technology Management, and Journal of Business Venturing Insights. I also translate research for educators and practitioners through AACSB Insights, industry collaborations, and accessible tools such as RaiiSE.
At RMIT, I lead the Regenerative Entrepreneurship stream within EARTH and co-lead the Multinationals, AI and Digitalization stream within EMERG. Across these activities, my aim is to produce rigorous research that helps people make better decisions and put knowledge into action.
