Professor Virginia Cha is a leading educator of Innovation & Entrepreneurship with multiple appointments at Singapore’s leading tertiary education institutions: Adjunct Professor at NUS Business School and at INSEAD; Adjunct appointments at SMART (Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology) and Lean LaunchPad @Singapore. At NUS, she teaches the MBA module on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, in addition to the EMBA module on Managing Change and Disruption. She has conducted numerous executive programs, with special original content on Entrepreneurial Mindset with emphasis on action-planning for Corporate Innovation Programs. Her research work in entrepreneurial logic has been published as a chapter in “The Entrepreneurial Behaviour. Unveiling the cognitive and emotional aspect of entrepreneurship”, published by Emerald (2020). Together with her MIT colleagues, she has recently published a book “Adaptive Innovation”, by World Scientific (2022).
In her multi-faceted four decades-long industry and academic career which spanned multiple countries, Virginia co-founded or was the sole-founder and CEO of multiple venture-funded, hi-tech companies in Singapore and China, with listings on NASDAQ and HKSE. She’s co-authored a book “Asia’s Entrepreneurs: Dilemmas, Risks and Opportunities”, published by Taylor and Francis (2009), which captured Singapore’s technology entrepreneurial history from 1995-2005. Additionally, Virginia is a member of the Future Council of World Economic Forum. Virginia is also an active researcher, mentor, and angel investor in Singapore’s entrepreneur ecosystem with 16 start-up companies in her angel investment portfolio with operations in Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, USA, Finland, and the UK.
Virginia’s latest research into innovation is on the subject of restorative innovation (www.restorativeinnovation.com). This emergent framework uses an economic model on how sustainable goods can reach mass consumption through innovation along three dimensions: increased supply, supply chain efficiency, and increased adoption. This framework is now taught in leading Singapore tertiary institutions and published in “An Introduction to Circular Economy”, published by Springer Nature (2020).
Virginia earned her Bachelor of Science in Information Computer Science, University of Hawaii, in 1980, and her PhD from National University of Singapore. She has lived in Hong Kong, Thailand, multiple cities in the U.S. and P.R.C., and is based in Singapore.