Biography
Kylie Heales is an Assistant Professor of Management and Marketing at the Edwards School of Business at the University of Saskatchewan. Dr. Heales's research explores how communities and entrepreneurs shape one another. Her work focuses on marginalized entrepreneurs globally, investigating relationships between entrepreneurship, social institutions, cultural norms, and community dynamics. Before joining academia, Kylie worked in community engagement and social impact assessment for major natural resource projects with URS (acquired by AECOM) and Hatch, and served as an advisor to the CEO of the Queensland Farmers' Federation in Australia. She continued this community focus during her MBA at Duke University, where she worked with entrepreneurs in Kenya and Zambia to brin their products to market, and co-founded a fintech startup. Dr. Heales diverted these interests to research during her dissertation at University of Alberta where she worked with Tunisian and Haitian entrepreneurs to identify and address barriers to growth. Originally from Australia, Dr. Heales has embraced the prairie lifestyle with her Saskatchewan born husband, together exploring the Great Plains via snowshoeing, hiking and paddling.
Courses
Dr. Heales's teaching approach is deeply rooted in research and real-world experience, creating living labs where research meets hustle to nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs. Her classes equip students to thrive in today's dynamic business landscape through activity-based learning, peer collaboration, and diverse examples that demonstrate entrepreneurship is for everyone. At the undergraduate level, she teaches Entrepreneurship & Venture Development, where students develop skills for new venture formation and business succession. At the graduate level, she teaches Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Venture Development for MBA students, focusing on evaluation skills for the new venture sector. Dr. Heales welcomes guest speakers, leverages contemporary media, and draws from her global work with entrepreneurs to provide students with evidence that business opportunities span all contexts and communities.
Dr Heales is actively seeking to recruit and mentor Ph.D and M.Sc. students interested in community-based entrepreneurship research.
COMM 447 Entrepreneurship & Venture Development
This course helps students develop the skills required for the successful formation of new business ventures, effective business succession, or small business expansion. Students examine their entrepreneurial potential and experience the process of planning new ventures through the preparation and formal presentation of comprehensive business plans.
MBA 846 Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Venture Development
This class provides students with the knowledge and evaluation skills needed to add value in the new venture sector of the economy. Students study current concepts in entrepreneurship, focusing on the evaluation of entrepreneurs, their ventures, and the venturing environment.
Research
RESEARCH GRANTS
Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar Kylie Heales, "Social norms and the path to entrepreneurship success," CAD $180,000, 2021-2024.
Forté Foundation Fellowship Kylie Heales, USD $30,000, 2015-2017.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Cascadden, M., Heales, K., Kingston, M., Heidak, P., & Jennings, P. D. (2025). Hybridizing Sustainability Metric Applications with Local Stakeholder Inputs: A life cycle assessment with a co-design demonstration. Organization Studies, 46(5), 693-720.
Heales, K., Zietsma, C., & Cruz, L. B. (2025). Navigating Intersectional Inequalities: Resource Assemblage for Firm Profits. In Necessity Entrepreneurship: Getting Beyond the Binary (Vol. 92, pp. 163-189). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Heales, K., Slade Shantz, A., Pacheco, D. F., Barin Cruz, L., & Zietsma, C. E. (2023). How Institutional Logics Influence Growth: A Field Experiment With Tunisian Women Entrepreneurs. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2023(1), 12727. Winner: 2023 Best OMT Entrepreneurship Paper, Academy of Management Annual Meeting.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Community-based entrepreneurship and innovation; institutional theory, institutional logics and social movements; marginalized entrepreneurs; social embeddedness and entrepreneurship; mixed-methods research including full-cycle, field experiments and qualitative comparative analysis.