Jamie Newth on his dual roles as researcher and practitioner - and creating impact as both

“I grew up in south-east Auckland, and went to high school out of zone at Macleans College because all of my cricket mates were there. Cricket was a massive part of my childhood and early life – I was meant to be a professional cricket player, not a researcher or entrepreneur.

“Although I had academic strengths, high school and even undergraduate level was not where they really shone. In fact, I only gained entry into my first Business School course because of a glitch in the new software system the University had at the time. But the one thing I can say with confidence about my academic self before university was that I was very curious and a generalist. I understood how things worked relatively well, especially at the big picture or systems level.

“I majored in Management and International Business for my BCom, and did just well enough in Management to get into postgraduate study. From there on I did legitimately well grades-wise because of a few reasons: one is that I enjoyed the style of postgraduate learning as, back then, it had a classroom dynamic that suited me better and the critical engagement with content suited my learning style.

“It was also the nature of the subject matter. There was a specialisation within the Management postgraduate programme called ‘Organisational Change and Innovation’ which, in going deep into organisation science, necessarily branched beyond organisations as contexts into sociology and psychology (and more), while maintaining that change and innovation orientation. That’s where I really found myself and my belief in my ability to achieve.

“When I learned about entrepreneurship in economics class at high school, I realised immediately that that was my thing. It aligned with my generalist nature and not wanting to be pinned down to a particular profession. But I didn’t have an obvious pathway into it. However, getting into postgraduate study and realising that I could do that, and do that well, and having supportive supervisors (Professor Chris Woods and Dr Deb Shepherd), allowed me to find my version of succeeding.

"One of the things I enjoy most about teaching – and maybe it’s because I know what it’s like to struggle with content as a student – is taking material which students may have a limited understanding of and presenting it to them (or ideally, discussing it with them) in a way that they understand and in which they can apply their own thoughts and ideas. Demystifying content is really rewarding.

“Also, that small impact that you have on many students can have a massive impact on what they do in the world with their time and their talent. As an academic, I believe my biggest impact on the world is through my students – the way they behave as business people, as business leaders and company directors.

“An academic career was therefore always appealing. So when I began my PhD, part of undertaking that was testing whether I would enjoy the research publication imperative of an academic career as much as the teaching.

“During the five or six years between my masters and PhD I’d also worked as a consultant. I was asked to do a small consulting engagement – applying an entrepreneurial mindset to an organisation – and then it just snowballed. I ended up doing small contracts for a really diverse range of purpose-driven organisations, small businesses, local government, facilitating workshops.

“This was quite a formative time. I quickly gained a lot of experience from being self-employed. It also reinforced my generalist interests, giving me a broad understanding of how different types of organisations create different types of value with different business models. So when it came time to do my PhD – and this became really relevant for Soul Capital as well – I brought that breadth of experience and knowledge, and the curiosity to ask: ‘How can entrepreneurship change things for the better?’

“During my PhD studies I was approached by a large international NGO which was looking for someone to help them innovate their business model. It was a cool opportunity to study how an organisation grapples with social entrepreneurship. This became a blurring of the practitioner and the researcher – I examined academically what I was involved in as a practitioner.

“Because my consulting engagement and my research were bound in upon each other, I saw the opportunity for impact investing as a form of capital for social entrepreneurship, which is what my PhD was about. I saw the trends that were starting to emerge around the world. And I was able to dive into that research, but also have the conversations, meet the people, see the opportunity to mobilise capital to support the entrepreneurs, ventures and projects which would take our economy to a more sustainable and inclusive place. And that conversation coalesced around our kaupapa, a project called Soul Capital.

“Soul Capital didn’t achieve a whole lot for a while. Impact investing wasn’t an established thing – it isn’t easy to establish a funds-management business from scratch, especially in a market that doesn’t exist, and without the capability or credibility to do so – but that’s entrepreneurship! It was a side project. But after I submitted my PhD, I had time to reflect, and I decided to commit to launching the venture.

“Soul Capital has now gone from being a side project and a very early player in that space to being the largest impact investment fund manager in the country, with $75m in funds under management.

“I do have a lot of unfinished business in scholarly research. Soul Capital has created a powerful data collection opportunity for those researchers – and I’m one – who are curious about how this stuff works and the tensions and challenges. It’s a really rich repository.

“I miss the inherent nobility of scholarship – the generation and dissemination of knowledge. But what I’m doing with Soul Capital is giving expression to how I wish the world would work, and to be ‘walking my talk’ right now is really satisfying.

“I still have the academic mindset – that critical lens of: ‘Does this have the integrity of what you’re trying to achieve?’ I still consider myself to be looking at the world through an academic’s eyes.

“I struggled to really feel like a credible academic – I had that sense of impostor syndrome many of us feel. I’d like someone to read this article and realise that there are many ways of becoming a good academic – you can find your own pathway and your own version of success without compromising. I was never going to do a PhD and subsequent research that I was less interested in just to open up my academic career opportunities; it wasn’t the way I approached it. If people take a more mainstream route because it offers more job opportunities, that gets us more people doing more of the same and reinforcing the status quo.

“We need to remain open that there are different ways of being a worthy researcher. And we need to realise that if we want to generate relevant research which changes and improves things, we can’t always stick to the norm.”