Dr Ehsan Khavandkar

PhD in Economics of Innovation, Aston University

Postgraduate Certificate(PGCert) in Learning & Teaching in Higher Education, Aston University

MSc in Knowledge Management, University of Southampton

BSc in Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST)

Dr Ehsan Khavandkar is an Assistant Professor in International Business and Strategy and the Education Lead for the International Business subject area at Birmingham Business School. He holds a PhD in the Economics of Innovation from Aston University, alongside an MSc in Knowledge and Information Systems Management from the University of Southampton and a BSc in Industrial Engineering. Prior to joining Birmingham, he held academic appointments at Loughborough University, the University of Hull, and Aston University.

He brings extensive leadership experience across the UK Higher Education sector, specialising in pedagogical innovation, large-scale curriculum design, and institutional growth. Notably, as Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes at the University of Hull, he led a comprehensive transformation of the MSc portfolio in Business and Marketing. This strategic overhaul resulted in substantial growth in student numbers alongside measurable improvements in retention, completion, and student satisfaction.

Dr Khavandkar has significant expertise in quality assurance, curriculum alignment, and international accreditation. He has led successful alignment initiatives for AACSB, EQUIS, and SBC accreditations across multiple institutions and maintains an active role in external governance and global benchmarking. He currently serves as a Quality Advisor for the University of Chester Business School and as an external examiner for DBA programmes at Teesside University and MBA and MSc programmes at Heriot-Watt University. He has also previously served as an external examiner at Cardiff, Coventry, Roehampton, and Manchester Metropolitan Universities across undergraduate, taught postgraduate, and doctoral provision. At Birmingham Business School, he led curriculum initiatives supporting the QS International Trade Ranking submission.

His academic practice is underpinned by a strong commitment to responsible management education and widening participation. He has consistently embedded inclusive excellence principles within governance and leadership through roles as an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Representative, a strategic contributor to Athena Swan action planning, and a member of Civic University task and finish groups across multiple institutions. As a member of a Carbon Literacy working group, he ensures that pedagogical innovation remains closely aligned with societal impact and sustainable development.

His research examines the co-evolution of regional innovation systems and entrepreneurial ecosystems. He specifically investigates the ‘capability paradox’ in SMEs, exploring how Agentic AI and Foundational Models can bridge the digital divide and foster resilience amidst geoeconomic fragmentation. This research informs his vision for the ‘Business School of the Future’, where he integrates Transnational Education (TNE) with Internationalised Curricula (IoC). By exploring how co-productive pedagogies and Authentic Business Learning can be institutionalised through ‘students-as-partners’ models, he advocates for an Equitable Digital Pedagogy. Championing the ‘Twin Transition’, his work ensures that curriculum design remains inclusive, culturally responsive, and aligned with place-based economic development and international scaling.

Prior to his academic career, Dr Khavandkar spent almost a decade as an industrial and management consultant, holding roles in project management across multiple sectors. This professional background, coupled with his history of mentoring start-ups, deeply informs his industry-engaged teaching and knowledge-exchange practice. His contributions have been recognised by the Astonishing Academic Award (2017) and consecutive Knowledge Exchange Prizes (2021, 2022). His research has been supported by funders including Advance HE and the Ferens Trust.

He welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral and research students interested in the following areas: 

• Geoeconomic Fragmentation and SME Resilience: Investigating how resource-constrained firms leverage Foundational Models to navigate supply chain disruptions, tariff distortions, and the shift from ‘global efficiency’ to ‘regional resilience’. 
• Ecosystem Orchestration in Innovation Districts: Researching the role of ‘institutional stickiness’ and digital hyper-connectivity in preventing capital flight and fostering long-term value co-creation within UK tech superclusters. 
• The Twin Transition and Sovereign Resilience: Exploring how small firms synchronise digital maturity with green growth (Net-Zero) to secure a competitive advantage in ‘Innovation Valleys’ and sovereign-led industrial networks. 
• Epistemic Fluency in Transprofessional Education: I welcome proposals that investigate how students develop the capacity to navigate and integrate multiple ‘ways of knowing’-switching between technical, ethical, and business-strategic mindsets. Grounded in Authentic Business Learning (ABL), this research area explores how practice-led engagement and ‘cognitive realism’ enable students to apply these fluencies within the unpredictable ecologies of the global professional landscape. 
• Synthetic Business Environments and Cognitive Realism: Leveraging autonomous scenario modelling to create ‘equitable digital laboratories’ that provide under-represented students with access to high-stakes, culturally responsive business simulations. 
• Institutionalising Co-production through Agentic AI: Examining the systemic shifts required to move from passive instruction to a ‘students-as-partners’ model, where agentic workflows bridge the gap between academic theory and real-world industrial practice.

Dr Khavandkar’s research operates at the nexus of innovation geography, international business strategy, and higher education policy. Drawing on an interdisciplinary background in economics and industrial engineering, he investigates how emerging technologies and co-creative frameworks can mitigate structural vulnerabilities within global value chains and modernise the institutional architectures of higher education. By bridging the gap between industrial digital transformation and pedagogical innovation, his work seeks to resolve complex challenges in both global market integration and future-proofed knowledge exchange. 

Current Research Interests: 

Regional Innovation Systems and Global Resilience: Exploring the co-evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems and place-based innovation. He focuses on how algorithmic discovery and distributed innovation models foster regional resilience and collaborative value creation within an increasingly globalised economy, emphasising the role of Global Innovation Networks (GINs). 

Interdisciplinary Innovation Policy in Transnational Contexts: Researching the application of multi-lens analysis to science and technology policy. This work focuses on the spatial dynamics of innovation systems, exploring how national policies interact with global trade flows to shape high-tech industrial clusters and cross-border knowledge exchange. 

Distributed Innovation and Global Digital Maturity: Exploring how platform-based innovation allows firms to manage distributed digital maturity. This research identifies the mechanisms that allow SMEs to participate in sophisticated, cross-border digital ecosystems, linking place-based innovation to international scaling. 

SME Innovation and the ‘Capability Paradox’: Investigating the strategic integration of Foundational Models and Agentic AI within small-to-medium enterprises. This research explores the digital divide, examining how AI-mediated co-creation and platform-based innovation enable resource-constrained firms to navigate geoeconomic fragmentation, overcome institutional voids, and enhance export resilience. 

The Business School of the Future: Developing future-proofed curriculum models grounded in the ‘Twin Transition’ - the synergistic advancement of digital transformation and green sustainability. This research examines the scaling of transprofessionalism and epistemic fluency within the context of Transnational Education (TNE). 

Authentic Business Learning (ABL) and Competency-Based Frameworks: Investigating the transition from passive pedagogical models to practice-led capability building. His research explores how ABL facilitates competency-based curriculum design, creating a ‘cognitive realism’ that bridges the gap between academic theory and professional practice. 

Equitable Digital Pedagogy: Exploring the institutionalisation of Authentic Business Learning (ABL) through Agentic AI frameworks. His work investigates how synthetic business environments and autonomous scenario modelling can democratise access to high-stakes knowledge exchange while ensuring curricula remain culturally responsive and internationalised (IoC). 

Agentic AI in Business Education: Analysing the shift from static prompt-response interactions to dynamic, nonlinear AI workflows. He focuses on how agentic systems- capable of autonomous task planning and multi-agent collaboration- can simulate complex business ecologies, reducing the ‘transitional gap’ between the university and the global labour market. 

Institutionalising Co-production: Researching the systemic integration of co-productive pedagogies to bridge the gap between academic theory and industrial practice. This includes investigating the role of University-Industry Linkages (UILs) in fostering place-based economic development through the ‘students-as-partners’ model.  

Current Research Projects 

Interdisciplinary AI Competency Framework for Higher Education: This funded multi-institutional research project, comprising UCL, UEL, SDU, and UoB Dubai, aims to develop sector-ready curriculum tools for AI literacy with an explicit focus on digital equity. The initiative establishes an interdisciplinary framework that bridges the gap between technical AI capabilities and pedagogical practice, ensuring the integration of Agentic AI and Foundational Models remains inclusive and ethically grounded. 

Beyond the Prospectus: Authentic Student Journeys in Higher Education: This funded multi-institutional research and civic initiative employs a ‘students-as-partners’ framework to co-create authentic narratives that challenge traditional deficit-based aspiration models. By positioning students as primary co-creators of knowledge, the project critically examines the complexities of transition, institutional belonging, and structural inequality within the UK Higher Education landscape. 

Authentic Business Learning: A Developmental Education Strategy: This project focuses on the synthesis of competency-based education, constructivism, and critical pedagogy into a unified developmental strategy. By employing a social realist lens, the study investigates how these theoretical frameworks can be institutionalised to support Authentic Business Learning architectures and bridge the gap between theory and practice. 

Bridging the Capability Paradox: Resilience and Value Co-creation in Regional Innovation Districts: This research project investigates the complex dynamics of value co-creation and industrial co-evolution within high-growth innovation districts and tech superclusters in the UK. The study examines how hyper-connectivity and ‘institutional stickiness’ mitigate the capability paradox in resource-constrained firms, identifying how platform-based orchestration can be leveraged to foster sovereign economic resilience.