Professor Jonathan Marks.

For GIBS Business School’s Professor Jonathan Marks, academia is a second career. Before going back to university to do his MBA and PhD, he was an entrepreneur. “Entrepreneurship was only really coming into its own in South Africa at an academic level at that time. In fact, entrepreneurship was not a core subject – it was an elective course,” he says. Entrepreneurship has a body of knowledge that goes back hundreds of years and this reminded Marks of what he first wanted to do when he left school – teach.

“Being an entrepreneur provided me with the intellectual and conceptual framing of something that I had only known intrinsically.”