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Dr Kellie Forbes-Simpson

Assistant Professor

Department: Newcastle Business School

Entrepreneurship Educator

Kellie is an experienced and award-winning entrepreneurship educator.  With over 10 years of experience in supporting students and graduates to develop and run successful businesses while at University and beyond at a variety of institutions, Kellie has continued her academic career at Northumbria. 

Kellie has worked on both extra-curricular and curricular entrepreneurship education.  Kellie supported Northumbria students to start Enactus Northumbria.  This social enterprise society competed at its first Enactus National Championship and went on to win Rookie of the Year in 2018 and Kellie received, for the second time, University Adviser of the year.  

In curricular while at Northumbria Kellie has had a pivotal role in the innovative entrepreneurship programmes at Northumbria.  Kellie started off as a Team Coach on the BA EBM programme, which was based on the Team Academy approach to management education.  Since then Kellie is now Programme Leader for the BA Business and Entrepreneurship programme.  This innovative one-of-a-kind programme gets students to run and start businesses from day one, and students use their ventures as a vehicle for their business and entrepreneurial learning.  The programme provides a coaching environment where students are coached and supported through the ups and downs of running a business and being a university student.  

Research Interests

Kellie's experience in entrepreneurship education led the way for her interest in exploring identity construction of participants of entrepreneurship education.  Her PhD thesis explored aspects of authenticity, belonging and distictiviness,  identity regulation and gender in participant's identity work.  

Kellie Forbes-Simpson

Campus Address

City Campus East 1 Rm: 239
Northern Design Centre


  • Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
  • Entrepreneurial Identity and Leadership: The Research Imperative, Rusk, M., Forbes-Simpson, K. 15 Sep 2016, Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Reading, UK, Academic Conferences and Publishing International
  • Beta: an experiment in funded undergraduate start up, Jones, P., Forbes-Simpson, K., Newbery, R., Maas, G. 1 Oct 2015, In: Industry and Higher Education

  • PhD May 16 2023
  • Careers Guidance PGCert September 01 2015
  • Politics MA September 30 2005
  • Politics BSc (Hons) June 21 2002
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy FHEA
  • Qualification of Career Guidance QCG 2009


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