Conversations with Goodman host Susan LeBlanc speaks with Brock graduate Paul Pounder (BBA ’98) about his academic career.

After graduating from Brock University’s Goodman School of Business with a BBA degree and a concentration in entrepreneurship, Pounder returned to his home in Barbados, where he worked for the government for several years and became interested in operations management. This led him to pursue a PhD in mechanical and manufacturing engineering at the University of Birmingham, and more recently to The University of The West Indies where he teaches entrepreneurship and strategic planning.

One notable area of his research is social entrepreneurship where he has recently studied prisoner re-entry programs.

In this podcast, he describes his research efforts to help prisoners see that they have the potential to expend the energy they had previously put into negative endeavours such as illegal businesses and put it into their re-entry to society in a positive way.

Based on the research, prisoners have the entrepreneurial intentions and attitudes that are important in setting up a new business.

“They had the toolkit that’s really necessary to leverage an entrepreneurial venture and they were big risk takers which I think is a key part of entrepreneurship – identifying the opportunity, being able to correlate all the resources together and take advantage of the opportunities that existed out there. All those characteristics were very prevalent within the population that I interviewed,” Pounder said.

Pounder was on campus earlier this year to visit some of his colleagues that he has kept in contact with since his time at Brock.

This podcast is the latest in the Conversations with Goodman series which is produced by the Goodman Marketing, Communications and Alumni Relations team and features guests from the Goodman community.