Di Fleming

Innovation comes from the collision of the unfamiliar.

Profile

As the former Chair of Ducere Global Business School, Executive Director of the Ducere Foundation and Founding President of the Australia Africa Chamber of Commerce, Di has been working across Africa for over 15 years building education programs, developing commercial relationships, and exploring ways of solving some of the greatest global challenges through innovation and entrepreneurial mindsets.

Current work
Di is the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Mauritius in Victoria and the Co-Founder and Director of the Global Curriculum Orbit and the Global Orbit Nexus. At the heart of this business is the advancement of entrepreneurship as a literacy in schools and through youth-based programs where they are mentored to find answers to some of the most urgent problems facing our planet through the creation of commercially viable solutions.

Awards: As the former Principal of Kilvington Girls Grammar (one of the first digital schools in Australia) Di was the first educator to become Telstra Businesswoman of the Year (Vic) and national AusIndustry winner for leadership in digital schooling, integration of industry partnerships including industry standard robotics for girls. Di Fleming has been recognised as a Member of the Order of Australia, AM for her work across global education and Australia Africa relationships.

Previous experience
Di is the former Chair of the Advisory Group on Australia Africa Relations, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the founder, and former CEO of Digital Harbour a major greenfield technology precinct at the Melbourne Docklands and the founding CEO of Lab 3000-the Centre for Excellence in Digital Design (CEDD) at RMIT University. Di is also a former associate professor in education and digital design at the Universities of Melbourne and RMIT respectively.

In 2001 Di Fleming was featured in the Federation Celebration Exhibition Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives a chronology of significant women across the previous one hundred years.
Di began her career as an educator and a director of Fleming Flight Services, a most successful small business, enhanced by government investment, of which she and her late husband were recipients. As young entrepreneurs, they were acknowledged for design and innovation in new flight technologies.

Expertise

Talking Points

Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurial Mindsets

No matter what role Di has assumed or the challenge she has accepted, she has always ignited answers and solutions with imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurship. For Di the contexts have been diverse, be it the reconstruction of a school that was falling, or a brownfield site in the Docklands calling for developers, a literacy program across Africa that recognised the creativity of its children and the need for culturally authentic stories or accepting the challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals and arguing the need t
Synopsis

Di is experienced across all levels of education, business leadership, and diplomacy where her commitment to design thinking has been significant. Di argues that creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation are used interchangeably, and they should not be. Each plays a unique part in a complex process where commercially viable innovation is determined by context. Frequently, large organisations are paralysed by business plans that are set in concrete when the world we now occupy, demands improvisation and flexibility with constant review and acceptance of the everchanging bodies of knowledge.
Di believes that “business as usual” is no longer appropriate, we need different approaches to governance to address global threats, and problems and to concentrate on the opportunities. Corporations and the higher education sector must focus on adaptation and flexibility in the need to constantly evolve content and pedagogy.
To get inside the goals and not recite what they are and only cite the imminent deadlines.