Though he’s lived in the US for decades, Professor David Teece is still a Kiwi at heart.
The former Blenheim boy has carved out a reputation as one of the world’s leading business academics, specialising in antitrust law and intellectual property. He’s the director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital at UC Berkeley’s school of business, held research and teaching positions at Oxford University and Stanford University, and has been granted eight honorary doctorates. Last year he received the Strategic Management Society’s prestigious CK Prahalad Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award.
After falling out with the board of his first consulting company, LECG, he went on to co-found the Berkeley Research Group, another global consulting firm. He has also authored more than a dozen books and written over 200 academic articles.
The descendant of a farming family that moved to the Nelson area in the 1860s, Teece grew up in Blenheim and Nelson, and graduated from the University of Canterbury with a Master of Commerce.
Now 70, he returns to New Zealand regularly, and he and his wife, Leigh, have business interests here. Perhaps the most prominent is the 70ha Mount Beautiful vineyard in North Canterbury, which he bought during the global financial crisis in 2008. He owns a significant amount of land on the Canterbury plains and was involved in the controversial Hurunui irrigation project before it fell into difficulty and was sold last year.
He also owns a 16% share of Vomo Island Resort in Fiji, along with other Kiwi investors.
In the late 1990s he was behind the buyout of the Canterbury clothing brand, but the company got into trouble and was sold in 2009 to UK sports retailer JD Sports.
In 2001 he took part in the Knowledge Wave conference in Auckland and is credited with helping to found the Kiwi Ex-pat Association, known as Kea, with Sir Stephen Tindall.
He has made various philanthropic donations to the University of Canterbury, including one to restore its historic telescope, and in 2013 was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to New Zealand-United States relations.
2018: $230 million