Rate My Professor Xiao Ma

Xiao Ma is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, and Director of the Centre for Business and Industry Transformation (CBIT). In this leadership role, he oversees activities aimed at empowering disruptive entrepreneurs through personalised education, building ventures to transform industries, and conducting world-leading research on high-impact challenges. Internationally recognised as a thought leader in entrepreneurship, business transformation, and the digital economy, he co-created the UK's top-ranked MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship program, as per Eduniversal's Best Masters rankings since 2021. He also serves as Visiting Professor at Inner Mongolia University, where he co-created the UK-China Digital Economy Lab, and holds positions as an independent board member for several large organisations and investment committee member for private equity and venture capital funds.

Transitioning from industry to academia, Xiao Ma built a distinguished career as a serial entrepreneur, founding, growing, and exiting five ventures across Europe and Asia. He acted as partner and Investment Committee Member for a top-tier Private Equity firm, steering over $600 million in digital ventures and sustainable precision farming solutions. Earlier, as a strategic consultant, he led transformation projects for numerous businesses, including Fortune 500 companies and PLCs listed on exchanges in the US, UK, China, Japan, and Singapore. His research specialisations include entrepreneurship, innovation, data science, artificial intelligence, digital economy, service ecosystems, and intrapreneurship. Key interests encompass data economy and sustainable solutions for industry challenges, B2B platforms, competence mapping, business cloud, transformative methodologies through system theory and computational ontology, impacts of technologies like IoT, machine learning, and AI on business models and society, and business transformation for sustainability and Net Zero, such as digital twins for beef farming and smart agriculture. Notable publications include 'Every staff is a superstar and everyone is an entrepreneur' (Human Resource Development International, 2025, with Iliev, Bal, and Yin Chan), 'Unpacking Digital Transformation: Identifying key enablers, transition stages and digital archetypes' (Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2024, with Gillani, Chatha, Jajja, and Cao), 'Thinking fast and slow: a revised SOR model for an empirical examination of impulse buying at a luxury fashion outlet' (European Journal of Marketing, 2024, with Cao and Meadows), 'On exploring pose estimation as an auxiliary learning task for visible–infrared person re-identification' (Neurocomputing, 2023, with Miao, Huang, Zhang, and Han), and 'Data analytics in a privacy-concerned world' (Journal of Business Research, 2021, with Wieringa, Kannan, Reutterer, Risselada, and Skiera). He delivers regular keynote addresses on digital economy, entrepreneurship, and business transformation, and contributes expert evidence to panels including the European Commission’s GDPR round-table, IET Standards committee for IoT, and DCMS Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.