Developing a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem for Aotearoa

Dr Marissa Kaloga

The Business School’s new Hynds Lecturer of Entrepreneurship, Dr Marissa Kaloga, is driven by a desire to help address inequities in entrepreneurial outcomes.

A PhD in Macro Social Work and Global Health may initially seem an unlikely foundation for an entrepreneurship academic. But educator, researcher and scholar Dr Marissa Kaloga believes that graduate studies in community development and social justice, combined with undergraduate studies in international development, were pivotal in helping her find her purpose. “The combination of these programmes provided me with a global and applied understanding of how to pursue social equity through economic justice initiatives,” she explains. “With entrepreneurship as a proven path to wealth creation in marginalised populations, it made sense to look at how to facilitate access to the resources to build new ventures. The further I engaged with entrepreneurship, the more I loved the inspiration and passion that founders brought to their work, and it just grew from there.”

Marissa’s now bringing her own inspiration and passion to the Business School as the new Hynds Lecturer of Entrepreneurship, a dual appointment between the School and the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). The role sees her combine teaching and research, working across diverse faculties at the University to co-create opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship while lecturing for the Department of Management and International Business. “Coming from a background in community development and social work, I was curious about how my expertise would fit into the landscape,” she says. “The Business School feels unique for their open-mindedness and ability to host competing perspectives with ease. They have been very supportive of my interdisciplinary approach to entrepreneurship.”

Marissa’s current interdisciplinary collaborations include working with the Department of Global Studies and the School of Music. For the former, she’s helping to design a new elective course for Semester 1: GLOBAL250: Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change. “As part of the course I’m currently working on case files for a CSI-type investigation into why some social enterprises are unable to make the impacts they intend to. I think it will be really interesting,” she says.

For the School of Music, she will be teaching a newly re-designed MUSIC365 Music Industry and Business course. “Most music graduates will work independently at some stage in their careers, and we’ll be exploring the future of the industry, where opportunities lie, and how musicians can stay true to their vision while pursuing financially sustainable careers,” she explains. She’s found both programmes “inspiring”: “It has been great expanding my conception of innovation and entrepreneurship to align with these disciplines’ values and approaches.”

In actual fact, Marissa has spent her career expanding her conception of innovation and entrepreneurship, driven by her desire to address inequities in entrepreneurial outcomes. Over the last decade she’s worked to support entrepreneurs in the United States, Guinea and Aotearoa New Zealand, including what she describes as a “foundational” role as Director of Innovation at the Economic and Community Development Institute (ECDI) in the US (where she’s originally from). The ECDI is the largest Small Business Administration (SBA) microlender in the US and works to ensure that entrepreneurship is available to all through a combination of education, capital provision, advocacy, and innovation. “Having spent time at ECDI working directly with diverse founders grounds my work in the day-to-day realities of building a venture, and helps my research stay relevant,” she reflects.

Social relevance is key, she asserts. “We must expand our innovation and entrepreneurship thinking to include the more complex, and much messier, social context we operate in. Aotearoa New Zealand has unique strengths in this regard, as Māori and Pacific peoples explore how their indigenous economic models may offer insights into a path forward for both healthy people and a healthy planet.”

Over the coming months Marissa will delve further into Aotearoa New Zealand’s unique entrepreneurial culture, leading a study entitled “Developing a Theory of Entrepreneurial Belonging: Exploring Inclusion and Exclusion in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.” The study will examine how Entrepreneurial Support Organisations (ESOs) work together and impact inclusive entrepreneurship, and has been funded by the Business School’s newest research centre, Juncture: Dialogues on Inclusive Capitalism. “Juncture provides funding for this kind of research that sits across disciplines and seeks to create social impact,” notes Marissa. “My hope is that the results of this study will encourage other scholars and funders to consider interdisciplinary, community-engaged research.”

There are two aspects to the study, she explains. The first is a participatory mapping phase where the research team will work with local entrepreneurial ecosystems to build a network of the links between ESOs. This will give them a systemic understanding of how entrepreneurial supports are organised across the country. The second phase focuses on in-depth interviews with support providers and diverse founders to explore their experiences of belonging and othering in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Marissa anticipates having preliminary results of the study by early 2026, and has high hopes for the research. “I hope that the results of this study can inform policy both in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally regarding the potential determinants of othering and belonging in entrepreneurial ecosystems,” she says. There is an appetite from many founders and entrepreneurial supporters in our country for a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, she believes. “Doing this research and building out the toolkit is, I hope, my contribution to that discussion.”

Despite the multi-faceted nature of her mahi, Marissa stays grounded in “the big ‘why’” of her work. “As a teacher I work to foster my students’ creativity and self-efficacy, as a researcher I seek to understand how to create spaces of belonging, and as a scholar I support the development of inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems to enable more people to find the resources they need to build a more just, equitable and beautiful future,” she explains. Perhaps most importantly, her new role at the Business School enables her to inspire students just as she was inspired during her own study journey. “I love challenging students’ perceptions of what’s possible and exploring their emerging visions of how they can impact the world,” she enthuses. “We need a generation of changemakers, and I hope to be a part of helping them find their voices.”