Prof Boris Urban

Boris has more than 30 years of academic and professional experience in business, where he has practiced, taught and researched, organisational behaviour, strategy and entrepreneurship. His academic appointments include Professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration (WBS), University of Witwatersrand, Associate Prof. at University of Johannesburg, and lecturing at various Business Schools globally.

Boris was the inaugural Chair in Entrepreneurship at Wits and is a rated researcher.

Boris’s academic studies are positioned in commerce and management where he holds a Ph.D (University of Pretoria). Boris has been bestowed with many honours which include: Juta prize, Sasol prize, MANEX Research award, WBS Top researcher of year award (2010-2016), Deans award for Best Researcher in the Wits CLM Faculty (2013 and 2015), and the Research and Knowledge Exchange (RAKE) award from the UK based Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

Apart from his academic background, Boris has wide-ranging business experience. He first gained entrepreneurial familiarity by working part-time in his father’s business from the age of 14. Boris has created new ventures, operated both as a franchisor and as franchisee, and worked for MNCs in retail industries, with broad exposure to strategic and general management functions. Through training and consulting, he has delivered interventions to local and international corporate clients in the private, NGO and public sectors.

Boris is regularly invited as a keynote speaker and as a subject expert on TV and radio shows.

Boris conducts internationally relevant, high-quality independent research. His strategy of developing junior African scholars advances scholarship beyond high-impact factor journals through mainstream publishing. His primary research agenda is to expand African knowledge within a unified explanatory structure to understand entrepreneurial behaviour at the individual, organisational and societal levels.