The founder of the Kiwi Expatriate Network (KEA) and the patron and inaugural member of the Motu Hapū, an invitation-only group of prominent economics and public policy experts, Professor David Teece has always maintained his New Zealand links despite his career in the US.
Teece, 70, is the Thomas W Tusher Professor in Global Business at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is also the director of the school’s Institute for Business Innovation. He has written more than 30 books and 200 scholarly papers, and he is co-editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management.
He pioneered the dynamic capabilities perspective, defined as “the ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments.”
In 2010 he co-founded Berkeley Research Group, an expert services and consulting firm of economists and other professionals with expertise in domains ranging from higher education to corporate finance.
Teece has a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and has held teaching and research positions at Canterbury University, Stanford University and Oxford University.
The descendant of a farming family that arrived in the Nelson area in the 1860s, Teece includes among his New Zealand property portfolio the 70ha Mt Beautiful vineyard in North Canterbury. The vineyard, which he and his wife Leigh established during the global financial crisis, has taken off, with wine exports to eight countries and 38 US states.
As a major landholder on the Canterbury Plains, Teece has a vested interest in the controversial $200 million Hurunui irrigation project. He has a 9% shareholding in it and may be looking forward to providing irrigation for his 537ha finishing block just north of Cheviot, which handles upward of 12,000 stock units from his Esk Head high country station near Lake Sumner. But the Hurunui scheme lost Crown funding earlier this year under the new Coalition government although farmer-shareholders said they were considering still going ahead.
The Teece family regularly visit Christchurch where he has made an endowment and facilities buildout gift for the Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities at the University of Canterbury (in the Christchurch Arts Centre). He has also made a gift to the University of Canterbury to restore the Townsend/Teece Telescope (built in 1864). The telescope is in the arts centre’s observatory, which has been closed since the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
Teece has received four honorary doctorates and is a Companion of the NZ Order of Merit.