Meet the staff
Associate Professor Paul Brown
Paul is the Course Director of the Diploma in Innovation and is a national and international award-winning innovator in TD School. He specialises in innovation, with a particular focus on sustainable production systems.
Paul likes to tinker and invent, mainly in the space of information and measurement. He is passionate about new technology and how changes in technology can be integrated into new products, services and business models to transform society to become more environmentally and economically sustainable.
Paul has successfully led over 15 externally funded research engagements, leading to over 28 policy papers and industry reports on a range of topics, including innovations such as a world-first national benchmarking of Environmental Management Capability in collaboration with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (see Office of the Chief Economist, Development of management capability scores).
He regularly publishes in leading international journals including the Journal of Cleaner Production, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, British Accounting Review and Business Strategy and the Environment.
Dr Jan Henrik Gruenhagen
Jan is the Deputy Course Director of the Diploma in Innovation. Jan’s research interests include international entrepreneurship, industry transitions, innovation systems and the development, adoption and diffusion of new technologies. Jan has been involved in several externally funded research projects informing policy and industry, including projects investigating enablers and barriers to technology adoption, decarbonisation initiatives in the resources sector, mapping and measuring innovation districts, and analysing regional diversification.
Prior to joining UTS, Jan worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at QUT Business School researching firm and system-level enablers and barriers to technology development, adoption and diffusion. He received his PhD for his research at the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research at QUT investigating start-up activities and the impact of returnee entrepreneurs in emerging economies. Jan also has extensive industry experience in the media industry.
Associate Professor Martin Bliemel
Martin wears a few hats, including Director of Innovation for TD School. Martin holds a BSc (Mechanical Engineering) and MBA from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and a PhD in Business from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Between his MBA and PhD, he ran a tech startup consultancy to help engineers, scientists and technologists take their ideas to market. In his spare time, he also helped run the Angel Forum, Canada’s oldest angel network. He still likes to tinker with tech, ranging from bike maintenance through to creating online servers on unused raspberry pi’s.
Martin’s research interests include entrepreneurial networks, accelerators, education, research commercialization, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and the entrepreneurial university. In particular, his work played a key role in the design of the AUD $23m Incubator Support Programme by the Australian government, and the evaluation of the $150m Southern Cross Renewable Energy Fund by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) who are now acting on his team’s recommendations. These days, his main focus is on entrepreneurial ecosystems and working with various levels of government to stimulate entrepreneurial activity and cultivate innovation precincts.
Dr Jarnae Leslie
Specialising in sustainability, Dr Jarnae Leslie is a Lecturer at the UTS TD School with a PhD in system change and waste reduction. Her research focuses on combining public reporting with social science approaches to understand barriers and enablers to system change. This work has a particular focus on the alignment of public policy to support change, working with stakeholders and communities, to support sustainable futures development. In 2023, Jarnae completed her PhD in holistic waste reduction target assessment and public reporting in Australia; identifying factors that influence change to support system change. A trailblazer, she was also the first internationally to graduate with a combined Bachelor of Design in Interior Architecture and a Bachelor of Creative Intelligence & Innovation.
Jarnae has previously conducted research for the Department of Agriculture, Water & Environment (DAWE), BehaviourWorks Australia (Monash University), UTS Business School, the UTS Centre for Business & Social Innovation and the UTS TD School. Projects featured themes of defining and measuring waste prevention measurement, public reporting (e.g., the 2021 Annual National Waste Report), circularity & waste reduction targets, collaborative partnerships (e.g., University-SME), sustainable universities, and transdisciplinarity. Since 2019, Jarnae has taught creative innovation, complex systems approach and futures thinking at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in the TD School. Jarnae has been awarded two team teaching awards for coordinating university subjects: the UTS Learning and Teaching Award (2021) and the UTS Learning and Teaching Citation (2019).
Find out more about Jarnae’s research and teaching: UTS staff profile, LinkedIn and PhD thesis
