Role
Francis is currently involved in supervision of Ph D and DBA students at NBS/NTU. To date has supervised 12 doctoral students to completion whilst 4 more are in the ‘pipeline’. As a Module Leader, he taught undergraduate and postgraduate students who undertook programmes related to strategy and entrepreneurship. He was also Module Leader for Masters degree in International Entrepreneurship and MBA Elective on Business Development and Entrepreneurship.
Career overview
Prior to joining the Centre for Growing Businesses at Nottingham Business School in May 1999, Francis graduated with a Ph D in Management Studies at Cranfield University’s School of Management near Bedfordshire. His doctoral thesis was on growth and development of enterprises from small to medium size. He led Africa Centre for Entrepreneurship and Growth which was based in Nairobi, Kenya. During this period, he designed and delivered programmes on SMEs in Eastern and Southern Africa in partnership with universities and the private sector.
Research areas
Francis current research interest is oncommunity-based entrepreneurship which was motivated by his study visits to First Nation communities and New Dawn Enterprises in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in Eastern Canada a few years ago. The goal of his research is to develop a transferable organisational model for job creation in rural and non-metropolitan areas and to enhance a culture of self-reliance among communities suffering from chronic unemployment. The First Nation communities he visited have a successful track record over more than two decades of developing their own models of community enterprise and have used this to develop a range of successful enterprises which generate income-generating services. He is exploring how this ‘success’ can be applied to Limpopo communities in South Africa and elsewhere - thus, his project involves developing a theoretical framework and then testing it in practice.
External activity
Dr Franis Neshamba is a Fellow and Chartered Manager of the Chartered Management Institute.