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Xiao Ma

Xiao Ma

Professor and Director of Centre for Business Transformation

Nottingham Business School

Role

Xiao Ma is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at Nottingham Business School, and the Director of the Centre for Business and Industry Transformation – CBIT.  As the CBIT Director, Xiao is to provide leadership for all centre activities including empowering disruptive entrepreneurs through personalised education, building ventures to transform industries, and conducting world-leading & high-impact research.

Career overview

Xiao has been a distinguished executive leader for over a decade, with extensive experience in both the private and public sectors. Transitioned from a serial entrepreneur to an esteemed academic, he currently serves as a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at Nottingham Business School and the Director of the Centre for Business and Industry Transformation (CBIT). Recognized internationally 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 Master’s rankings since 2021.

Before his academic tenure, Xiao was a seasoned innovator and entrepreneur. He founded, grew, and exited five ventures across Europe and Asia. His entrepreneurial success extends to his role as a partner and Investment Committee Member for a top-tier Private Equity firm. He has steered over $600 million in digital ventures and sustainable precision farming solutions.

He spent some time as a strategic consultant in his early career, and led transformation projects for many businesses, including some Fortune 500 companies and many PLCs listed in US, UK, China, Japan and Singapore.

Research areas

Xiao has gained national and international recognition in the field of entrepreneurship, innovation, data science, artificial intelligence, digital economy, service ecosystem, entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship. Informed by industry challenges, he has led the augmentation of the existing knowledge base in new business models and the digital economy, backed by over £8 million in high-impact funding. For more details, visit his ORCID Profile.

He is particularly passionate about Data Economy and Sustainable Solutions for complex industry challenges. His pioneering work in the beef value chain digital twin has improved protein security and environmental sustainability, significantly reducing methane emissions, enhancing workforce skills, boosting employment, and increasing productivity. He co-created a flagship business cloud (CCM) that enables SME collaboration to address new opportunities, transforms business operation towards innovation and boosts regional economy. CCM has been recognised by World Bank’s as a master case for virtual business incubator. It is licensed to the the Singapore Government for enriching the national innovation ecosystem by fostering collaboration among enterprise, and toUK’s government’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult to accelerate manufacturing innovations.

Xiao's current research interests:

  • Interdisciplinary approach to address complex industry challenges and assessing impacts on sustainability against the Triple Bottom Line (Economical, Social, Environmental)
  • Digital Economy, particularly driven by Personal Data (owned by individuals) and PrivTech.
  • B2B platforms, competence mapping (for a region or sector) driven business collaboration, business cloud, and business benchmarking
  • Transformative methodologies for businesses and their stakeholders in the value constellation: especially through the lens of system theory; service ecosystem; computational ontology; knowledge Representation.
  • Impact of technologies on business models, economic models and society: particular technology advancement from Data Science; IoT; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Personal Data;
  • Business transformation and new business models for achieving better sustainability and towards Net Zero. i.e. smart animal husbandry models to reduce methane emission; digital twin for beef farming to improve sustainability across value chain and enable alternative finance models; smart agriculture to transform agri-machinery manufacturing; a corporate ESG driven new business model.

Xiao is currently open to PhD and Executive PhD supervisions.

External activity

Xiao is active in external engagement with both public and private organisations.

  • An independent board member for several large organisations.
  • An independent investment committee member for a Private Equity fund and a Venture Capital.
  • A regular speaker for keynote address in digital economy, entrepreneurship, and business transformation.
  • An expert panel member (or providing expert evidence) for various organisations such as European Commission’s GDPR round-table consultation; IET Standards committee for IoT; DCMS Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation for data mobility; etc.
  • A visiting Professor at Inner Mongolia University, China, and co-created the UK-China Digital Economy Lab.

Sponsors and collaborators

Collaborating with many industry partners, Xiao has built a portfolio of over £8m research projects.

Selective research projects:

Publications

  • Gillani, F., Chatha, K.A., Jajja, S.S., Cao, D. and Ma, X., 2024. Unpacking Digital Transformation: Identifying key enablers, transition stages and digital archetypes. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 203, p.123335.
  • Cao, D., Meadows, M. and Ma, X., 2024. Thinking fast and slow: a revised SOR model for an empirical examination of impulse buying at a luxury fashion outlet. European Journal of Marketing, 58(1), pp.342-368.
  • Miao, Y., Huang, N., Ma, X., Zhang, Q. and Han, J., 2023. On exploring pose estimation as an auxiliary learning task for Visible–Infrared Person Re-identification. Neurocomputing, 556, p.126652.
  • Yuan, H., Boakes, M., Ma, X., Cao, D. and Li, S., 2023, June. Visualising Personal Data Flows: Insights from a Case Study of Booking. com. In International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (pp. 52-60). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  • Miao, Y., Lin, Z., Ma, X., Ding, G. and Han, J., (2021). Learning Transformation-Invariant Local Descriptors with Low-Coupling Binary Codes. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
  • Wieringa, J., Kannan, P. K., Ma, X., Reutterer, T., Risselada, H., & Skiera, B. (2021). Data analytics in a privacy-concerned world. Journal of business research.
  • Ng, Irene C. L., Wakenshaw, Susan Y. L., Dhamotharan, Lalitha, Ma, Xiao, Tasker, Paul, Maull, Roger, Crowcroft, Jon and Parry, Glenn (2018) Response to centre for data ethics and innovation consultation. HAT Community Foundation.
  • Ma, X., Bal, J. and Issa, A., (2014). A fast and economic ontology engineering approach towards improving capability matching: Application to an online engineering collaborative platform. Computers in Industry.
  • Ma, X., Pogrebna, G. and Ng, I., 2014, December. Smart home, smart things and smart me in the smart city: the hub-of-all-things resource integration and enabling tool (HARRIET). In IET Conference on Future Intelligent Cities (pp. 1-6). IET.

See all of Xiao Ma's publications...

Press expertise

Selective press:

  • The Future of Work: How Entrepreneurship Can Thrive in an AI-Driven Economy (Entrepreneur, UK)
  • Exploring the Transformative UK AI-Powered project BeefTwin (APM)
  • Trailblazing in Business Transformation and Digital Innovation (Spotlight Podcast| Ep 75)