Dr Timothy Hor
Entrepreneur · Design Scientist · Educator
We don't need more entrepreneurs. We need more entrepreneurial humans.
I teach and research entrepreneurship at RMIT University in Melbourne, and I build things. For more than thirty years I have created and led digital businesses across Southeast Asia, Australia and the United States. I grew up with the internet, and most of what I know about ventures I learnt by starting them.
I came to this work sideways. I trained as a technical writer, moved into marketing and sales, ran companies, and then went back to university in my late fifties to study why some ventures find the resources to grow and most do not. My research treats entrepreneurship as a design discipline. But the point of teaching it was never to produce founders. It is to produce people who can act: conscious, curious, creative, confident, and able to stay at the helm when AI is in the room.
Three words I was once asked to choose to describe myself. They turned out to be my working life in order, and the three things I work on now.
- Fire Redefining Entrepreneurial Education Thirty years of starting and leading digital businesses, turned into a way of teaching that produces people who can act, not only founders.
- Crucible Reconstituting Design as a Science Heat applied on purpose: build, test, learn, write down what held. Research that produces knowledge people can act on.
- Prism Rehumanising Intelligence A prism makes no light of its own. AI spreads a person's intent into many versions, and someone still has to choose. Teaching people to be that someone.
The problem I'm working on
The question used to be: what do you know? It is now: what will you do with what you can know?
AI has made knowing cheap. Most advice assumes that people who grew up with technology will handle that easily. My teaching and research point the other way: being digitally savvy is not an edge in using AI, and AI skills are not digital skills. What matters is judgement, purpose, and the ability to say plainly what a thing is for and who it serves. Those are not technical skills, and they are the ones you cannot delegate.
Human at the Helm is my name for that stance: AI deep in the work, and a person accountable for where it goes. I hold it for a reason older than the technology. My faith teaches that people carry a dignity no tool can confer or remove, and that what we build is held in trust for others.
Recently designed
All research-
Paper
AI agents in the Double Diamond: augmenting design thinking practice in organisational innovation
Where AI agents belong in design thinking, and where the human control points have to be. The theory behind augmenti. Open access.
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Talk
Reimagining entrepreneurship education
We don't need more entrepreneurs. We need more entrepreneurial humans. What that means for how, and why, we teach.
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Talk
Design thinking: staying human and thriving in an AI world
AI can now do most of the steps in design thinking. The one it cannot do is deciding what is worth designing, and for whom.
Recently built
All ventures and tools-
Book
Startup Fundraising Decoded
Design principles and tools for founders raising capital beyond seed, built on the RaiiSE framework from my doctoral research. With Dimo Dimov, Georges Romme and James Skinner. The framework is also a working tool at raiise.org.
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Platform
augmenti
An AI coaching platform for student venture teams that puts Human at the Helm into practice: the AI generates, the team decides, verifies and attributes every decision, and the record of those decisions is what gets assessed.
Build
I have spent most of my working life inside digital businesses: starting them, selling for them, raising money for them, leading them, and once, closing one down. What I build now is tools and frameworks for the people doing the same.
Now
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Framework and book
RaiiSE and Startup Fundraising Decoded
RaiiSE is the fundraising framework from my PhD: a structured way for founders to raise capital beyond seed. The book, published by Palgrave Macmillan, turns it into principles and tools founders can use, with scholarly foundations in the appendix for those who want them. I have also built it as a tool founders can work through at raiise.org.
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Platform
augmenti
A multi-agent AI coaching platform for student venture teams, and the clearest example of Human at the Helm as pedagogy. Over eleven weeks a venture architect agent coaches the team through the Augmented Double Diamond. The AI is allowed to generate. Only the team is allowed to decide, verify, and attribute: every output is stamped kept, modified or rejected, with a reason. The log of those decisions, the Attribution Audit, is what gets assessed, so the grade rewards judgement rather than output. The theory is in the Research-Technology Management paper. Watch the walkthrough.
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Stance
Human at the Helm
A human-centred way of building and teaching with AI: the machine deep in the work, a person accountable for where it goes. It runs through my courses, my research and the ventures I advise. The theory is in the Research-Technology Management paper; the practice is augmenti.
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Research cluster
EARTH Regenerative Innovation
A research cluster I am part of, working on innovation that regenerates rather than depletes.
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Network
REAN, the RMIT Entrepreneurial Academics Network
A network of RMIT academics who build as well as study. I am a member.
Ventures I started
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Co-founder and CEO
DaxVenture
A property ecosystem combining proptech, fintech, insurtech and legaltech to make home ownership simpler. Co-founded with the first engineer I hired sixteen years earlier.
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CEO and Executive VP
Property365
A property marketplace started inside an established software company, to take the business beyond the products it was known for.
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Co-founder, President and CEO
NexusEdge Technologies
A university spin-off with a rich-thin-client framework, years before HTML5 made that ordinary. I led it through a venture round, a relocation across a border, growth to three offices, and its end. The most instructive years of my working life.
Businesses I led
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General Manager, Digital
Led the digital transformation of the country's largest English-language newspaper and turned around its property business.
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General Manager
Grew the country's leading property portal and built a new business serving developers.
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General Manager
Repositioned the business against a larger competitor and added an executive search arm.
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Change Consultant
Restructured the Indonesian operation, hired its local management, and rebuilt its software platform.
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Business Development Director
Brought the region's first banks, publishers and brands online with a US interactive agency, through the dotcom boom and bust.
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Country Manager
Ran a software consultancy serving banks, manufacturers and government.
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Regional Marketing Manager
Led marketing and PR across Asia Pacific and started the firm's internet services business in the region.
Mentoring and advising, past and present
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Mentor-in-Residence
Mentored founders in the Activate cohorts and ran an evidence-based capital-raising programme during my PhD years.
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Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Worked with the headmaster on the school's teaching and learning platform and its edtech strategy.
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Fellow
Part of a community of scholars who treat entrepreneurship as something you can design for.
Teach
I taught my first class in 1990: technical writing for engineering and computer science students in Singapore. Thirty years later I came back to the classroom to teach entrepreneurship. The subject changed. The job did not.
At RMIT University
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BUSM1325
New Venture Creation
From an idea to a venture that someone would pay for. Students build, test and pitch a real one.
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BUSM2685
Building AI-Native Products and Ventures
What changes when AI is in the product from the start, and what does not: the customer, the problem, and who is accountable.
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BUSM4052
Applied Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurial practice applied to a live problem, inside or outside a company.
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MBA and Executive MBA
Design thinking, digital entrepreneurship, technology futures, product innovation
Short, intensive courses for working managers who need frameworks they can use on Monday.
I am also a member of REAN, the RMIT Entrepreneurial Academics Network.
How I teach
Purpose before tools. Students learn to say what a thing is for and who it serves before they open a laptop, because that is the part AI cannot do for them.
Build real things. Every course ends with something that exists: a venture, a product, a pitch to people who can say no.
AI in the room, student at the helm. I expect students to use AI, and I expect them to defend every decision it helped them make. The work is theirs. So is the judgement. In my venture courses this runs on augmenti, a platform I built where the AI coaches, the team decides, and the record of their decisions is what I mark.
Before RMIT
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Lecturer and co-founder of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Academy
Co-founded an academy to make entrepreneurship a professional competency open to every student in the university, and led its Design Science Lab.
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Sessional Academic
Taught entrepreneurial mindset, ideation and business intelligence at postgraduate and undergraduate level, and designed a new postgraduate unit.
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Lecturer, Technical Communications
Taught engineers and computer scientists to write for the people who would use what they built.
Writing and talking about teaching
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Talk
Reimagining entrepreneurship education
Why the measure of entrepreneurship education should be entrepreneurial humans, not founders.
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AACSB Insights
A framework for human-centric AI-first teaching
A way to build AI into teaching that keeps people, not tools, at the centre.
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AACSB Insights
When Post-it notes are not enough
Design thinking in the classroom has to change when AI can do the ideating. What students must learn instead is to direct it.
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AACSB Insights
Entrepreneurial education: a path to employability
Why learning to build a venture prepares graduates for work, whether or not they ever found one.
For founders
During my PhD I ran a capital-raising programme for founders at River City Labs in Brisbane, built on the RaiiSE framework. The framework is now a book and a tool at raiise.org. If your accelerator, school or team wants a version of the programme, write to me.
Design
Design here means design science: research that produces knowledge people can act on, not only knowledge about them. Most of mine sits where three things meet: entrepreneurship as a design discipline, human judgement at the centre of work done with AI, and ecosystems that grow slowly and last.
Articles
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AACSB Insights
When Post-it notes are not enough
As AI agents make cognitive work fast and cheap, business schools have to teach students to direct intelligent systems with human judgement, not only to ideate.
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AACSB Insights
Building entrepreneurial ecosystems that thrive
Why business schools should cultivate acorns rather than chase unicorns.
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AACSB Insights
Rigorous research with demonstrable impact
How management scholars can use design science to make tools that solve real problems, and still publish.
Papers
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Research-Technology Management
AI agents in the Double Diamond: augmenting design thinking practice in organisational innovation
The Augmented Double Diamond: four AI agents across discover, define, develop and deliver, with human control points at every transition. Open access.
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Journal of Business Venturing Insights
Acorns to oak trees: designing entrepreneurial ecosystems for sustainability and diversity
A design science approach to ecosystems, written for people who have to build one.
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Technovation
Easing the cognitive load of general practitioners: AI design principles for future-ready healthcare
Design principles for an AI agent that helps doctors think, rather than thinking for them.
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Journal of Business Venturing Insights
Why we need design science in entrepreneurship research
A personal argument from a practitioner who went back to school: research should produce knowledge that someone can use.
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Journal of Business Venturing Insights
How should digital ventures raise equity capital beyond seed funding?
From theories of financial resource acquisition to a theory for acquiring it. The paper that became the RaiiSE framework, now a working tool at raiise.org.
Book and chapter
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Book
Startup Fundraising Decoded: design principles and tools for entrepreneurs
What my doctoral research found about raising capital after seed, rewritten as a set of actions founders can take.
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Chapter
Theological ethics in AI entrepreneurship
What a Christian account of the human person, stewardship, the image of God and covenant, has to say to people building ventures with AI.
Talks and recordings
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Talk
Reimagining entrepreneurship education
We don't need more entrepreneurs. We need more entrepreneurial humans. What that means for how, and why, we teach.
-
Talk
Design thinking: staying human and thriving in an AI world
AI can now do most of the steps in design thinking. The one it cannot do is deciding what is worth designing, and for whom.
-
Walkthrough
augmenti: augmented design thinking
A walkthrough of the platform where the AI coaches, the team decides, and the record of their decisions is what gets assessed.
Questions I'm working on now
When a start-up should make the leap to its Series A, and what carries the ones that get across. What business schools become once generative AI is ordinary. How to teach entrepreneurship so that AI sharpens a student's judgement instead of replacing it. What servant leadership and stewardship look like in ventures that are meant to regenerate the places they depend on, not only extract from them. And what a theological account of the human person offers founders who are deciding what to hand to a machine and what to keep.
Themes: entrepreneurship as design, regenerative innovation, servant leadership, AI governance.
Learn
Four degrees in four different disciplines, over thirty-five years, in two countries. Nobody planned it. Each one turned out to be the preparation for the next.
- 1986 to 1989Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Louisiana, United States. Paid for by a house my family sold and a share my eldest brother gave up. Finished in three years because the money would not stretch to four. I learnt how machines think, and that I was more interested in the people who had to use them.
- 1989 to 1991Master of Technical and Scientific Communication
Miami University, Ohio. Rhetoric and composition applied to engineering. People still ask what the degree is. It is the discipline of saying what a thing is, who it is for, and why it matters, in that order, and it has been under everything I have done since: every pitch, every product, every paper.
- 2017 to 2020Doctor of Business Administration, begun
After thirty years of building, I went back to study the thing I had been doing. A DBA is designed for practitioners, and it got me asking the right question: why do some digital ventures find the money to grow and most do not? It also showed me that answering it properly needed a different kind of research.
- 2020 to 2023PhD in Entrepreneurship, by design science
Queensland University of Technology. I moved from the DBA to a PhD so that I could use design science: research that does not only describe a problem but builds and tests a solution to it, and writes down what held. The thesis produced the RaiiSE framework and received the Executive Dean's Commendation for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis. I was 57 when I started and 60 when I finished.
What the sequence taught me
Computer science taught me how systems work. Technical communication taught me that a system nobody understands does not work. Thirty years of practice taught me what the textbooks leave out. The doctorate taught me how to turn that practice into knowledge another person can act on.
Put together, that is the stance I bring to AI. I can read the machine, I insist on knowing who it is for, and I treat every claim about it as something to build and test rather than believe. Design science is not a method I picked up at the end. It is what the whole sequence was training me to do.
Still learning
Fellow of the ESCP Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship in Berlin, where I keep company with scholars who treat entrepreneurship as something you can design for. And, since 2024, a close reader of C. S. Lewis, because the questions AI raises about what a person is turn out to be very old questions.
About
I am a tailor's son from a one-street town in Malaysia who ended up teaching entrepreneurship in Melbourne. The route was not direct.
I was once asked for three words that describe me. I chose fire, crucible and prism. It took me a while to see that they were not three qualities but one life in order.
Fire
Bagan Serai
I grew up in the 1970s in a small town surrounded by rice fields, the youngest of four by a wide margin, in a family where chicken for dinner was an occasion. My father was the best tailor in town, in the years when people were starting to buy their clothes ready-made. Money was always a problem. Friends were not. The town was Malay, Chinese and Indian, and nobody thought that remarkable.
Running
I was fast before I was anything else. I ran the 100 metres for my school, then for my state, and in 1982 I was the fastest man in Selangor, working as a bank teller to pay for the training. I also learnt that cramming works for a sprint and fails for an examination. My A-level results proved it.
A house for a degree
At 21 I had no degree and no way to pay for one. My family sold a house so that I could go to the United States, and my eldest brother gave me his share. I studied computer science in Louisiana, then technical communication in Ohio. People still ask, master of what? It turned out to be the most useful training of my life: purpose and audience first, in everything. The whole sequence of degrees, and what each one taught me, is on the Learn page.
Crucible
Thirty years of building
I taught writing at the National University of Singapore, moved into marketing, then sales, then the dotcom years. In 2002 I joined a software start-up, raised its venture round, moved it and my family to Kuala Lumpur, and led it until it came apart five years later. What followed was a decade of leading and turning around digital businesses in Malaysia and Indonesia, and co-founding another venture with the first engineer I had ever hired. The fire was still there. It had been through something, and it burned differently. The crucible is for silver and the furnace for gold, as Proverbs puts it, and the heart is tested the same way. Self-awareness is the hard part. Wisdom comes only with humility.
Back to school at 57
In 2020 I started a PhD at Queensland University of Technology, to work out why some digital ventures find the money to grow and most do not. I used design science, which applies heat on purpose: build something, test it, learn, and write down what held. The thesis received the Executive Dean's Commendation. It became the RaiiSE framework and a book, and I am now a Fellow of the ESCP Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship.
Prism
What I do now
A prism makes no light of its own. It takes one beam and shows what was always inside it. That is what a technical writer does with an engineer's idea, what a teacher does with a student's half-formed venture, and what a design scientist does with a practitioner's experience. It is also what generative AI does with a person's intent: spreads it into a dozen versions, every one of which still needs someone to choose. I teach entrepreneurship at RMIT University, research how ventures are designed, and work on keeping a human at the helm when AI is in the room. The aim is not more entrepreneurs. It is more entrepreneurial humans: people conscious, curious, creative and confident enough to act on what they can now know.
What I hold to
I am a Christian, and it shapes how I think about work and technology. Three old ideas do most of the work. Stewardship: what I have, including thirty years of experience, is held in trust for other people. Imago Dei: every person I teach, mentor or build with carries a dignity no tool can confer or remove, which is the real reason a human belongs at the helm. Covenant: relationships come before transactions, and trust, respect, humility and accountability are how I try to keep them.
I would rather add value to the people in front of me than be impressive to people I will never meet. I wrote about what these ideas offer people building with AI in a recent book chapter.
Elsewhere
- Google Scholar
- The book
- Melbourne, Australia
Design thinking: staying human and thriving in an AI world
AI can now do most of the steps in design thinking. The one it cannot do is the one that matters: deciding what is worth designing, and for whom.
Design thinking was built for a world where ideas were scarce and making was slow. Generative AI has reversed both. Ideas are now cheap and prototypes are fast, so the discipline has to change what it asks of the people in the room.
This talk makes the case that the human job moves upstream and downstream at once: upstream to the framing of the problem, where empathy and judgement set the brief, and downstream to the choosing, where someone has to stand behind what ships. In between, the machine can do a great deal. The argument is that this is good news for people who learn to work that way, and a problem only for those who confuse fluency with tools for judgement about ends.
Watch the talk YouTubeHosted on YouTube. The recording plays here when you press play.
What it covers
- The claim. Being digitally savvy is not an edge in using AI. The edge is knowing what the work is for.
- Where humans stay. Framing the problem and choosing what ships: the two ends of the Double Diamond that AI cannot own.
- What to do about it. Teach and practise design thinking as a discipline of judgement, with AI inside the process and a person at the helm.
Related
- AI agents in the Double Diamond, the paper that formalises the argument (Research-Technology Management, 2026)
- augmenti, the platform that puts it into practice
- When Post-it notes are not enough, the short version for business school leaders (AACSB Insights, 2026)
augmenti: augmented design thinking
A walkthrough of augmenti, the AI coaching platform I built for student venture teams, and the clearest example of Human at the Helm as pedagogy.
augmenti is a multi-agent coaching platform that takes a venture team through eleven weeks of the Augmented Double Diamond: discover, define, develop, deliver, with AI agents at each stage and human control points at every transition. The team works in the Pilot's Console. A venture architect agent coaches; it never decides.
The design rule is simple. The AI is allowed to generate. Only the team is allowed to decide, verify and attribute. Every AI output is stamped kept, modified or rejected, with a reason, and those stamps build a log called the Attribution Audit. That log is what I assess, so the grade rewards the quality of the team's judgement rather than the volume of its output.
Watch the walkthrough YouTubeHosted on YouTube. The recording plays here when you press play.
What you are watching
- The Pilot's Console. One console, eleven weeks, one persistent venture memory that every prompt reads from and writes to.
- You decide, you verify, you attribute. The three verbs built into the interface: human-only decision beats, caution chips on claims, and the kept / modified / rejected stamps.
- The Attribution Audit. The exportable record of every decision the team made about what the AI gave them, and the evidence I mark.
Related
- AI agents in the Double Diamond, the theory behind the platform (Research-Technology Management, 2026, with Bierly, Biru, Kim and Helmi)
- How I teach
Reimagining entrepreneurship education
We don't need more entrepreneurs. We need more entrepreneurial humans. What that means for how, and why, we teach.
Entrepreneurship education was built to produce founders, and it measures itself by how many it produces. This talk argues that the measure is wrong. Most students will never start a company, and the ones who do will not be helped much by a business plan competition. What all of them need is the thing underneath entrepreneurship: the capacity to notice a problem, decide it is theirs, and act on it without waiting to be told.
AI makes this urgent rather than optional. When knowing is cheap, the question a graduate faces shifts from what do you know to what will you do with what you can know. An education that answers the first question and ignores the second is preparing people for a world that has already gone. The talk sets out what an education for entrepreneurial humans looks like: conscious, curious, creative, confident, and able to stay at the helm when the machine is in the room.
Watch the talk YouTubeHosted on YouTube. The recording plays here when you press play.
What it covers
- The claim. Entrepreneurship is a means of self-discovery and agency, not only a way of making companies. Teach it that way and it serves every student.
- Why now. AI has made knowledge cheap and judgement scarce. The curriculum has to move with it.
- What to do about it. Build courses that end with something real, assess the quality of decisions rather than the volume of output, and keep the student at the helm.
Related
- Entrepreneurial education: a path to employability, AACSB Insights, 2026
- How I teach
Let's talk
I work with universities, founders and organisations on entrepreneurship education, venture building and human-centred AI. If you are working on something in that space, I would like to hear about it.