Dr Shawn Cunningham

Main field of expertise

• Facilitating sensemaking, strategy-forming and decision-making under conditions of uncertainty

• Advisory support to leaders in government, business and academia to make decisions despite complexity and uncertainty

• Meso resilience and how societies form and adapt meso organisations

• Industry modernisation, technological capability development, knowledge intensification

• Science, technology and innovation systems promotion

• Process consulting, discovery and process facilitation

In the past, he worked on the following topics

• Market System Promotion

• Local and regional economic development

• Knowledge intensive business services

• Private sector promotion

• Value chain, cluster and industry promotion

Working experience

2008: Partner in Mesopartner

2015-2021: Part-time Faculty Member (Innovation, Strategy & Technology Management), Stellenbosch Business School, Executive Education
2017-2019: Member of the external faculty (Innovation and technological change), Monash University South Africa
2010-2017: Research Associate (Innovation Systems & Policy) at the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa
2003-2007: Senior expert in the GTZ South Africa Local Economic Development and Business Development Services Programme
2001-2002: Worked in South African development agency NAMAC (National Manufacturing Advisory Centre Programme)
1996-2001: Own business in the IT sector. Involved in trade promotion, business chamber management and entrepreneurship promotion.

2021– current: Part-time Professor of Practice with the DST/NRF/Newton Fund Trilateral Chair in Transformative Innovation, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Sustainable Development hosted by the College of Business and Economics at the University of Johannesburg.

Personal background

PhD. (Business Administration), 2009, Potchefstroom Business School, North West University, South Africa.
Master in Business Administration (MBA), 2001, North West University, South Africa
Certificate in Strategic Leadership, Change Management and Project Management, 1998, Graduate Institute of Management Technology (GIMT), South Africa

Born in 1973. Shawn lives in Pretoria, South Africa.

Main areas of research, practice and advisory service  

Improving innovative, leadership and change capabilities in organisations
Assisting leadership teams and organisations to make sense of their environment and own behaviour, formulate strategies to become learning organisations that harness their tacit and explicit knowledge to become more innovative. Build technological and strategic management capability of public, private and academic organisations. 

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Building search, discovery and exploration capability in teams
Assisting teams from a range of economic and technological development organisations to conduct search and exploration activities to better understand opportunities for change, adaptation, innovation. Build the capacity of teams to engage with a range of internal and external stakeholders to build technological and organisational capability. Design, support and build capacity for process consulting and change within and between organisations. 

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Strengthen decision making for strategy, policy and development practice
Coaching of leaders to improve the learning capability of their organisations, assist leadership to develop better options despite complexity to enable decision making, policy formation, organic change and healthy organisations. This might involve social research methods such as Sensemaker, Social Network Analysis or process consulting.

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Close the gap between industry and the academia

This involves identifying unique problems in industry that can be addressed by universities, researchers and industry working together. This kind of diagnosis can originate from a university or from industry.