Leading Critical Decision-Making Program

Dr Robert Kay is the Managing Director of Incept Labs and a founding Director of RiPLTec. His career has moved continuously between industry and academia. He was formerly the Head of Strategic Innovation at Westpac Banking Corporation; a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems and Organisational Development at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a research analyst at Bovis Lend Lease. Establishing Incept Labs in 2008, Robert has been commissioned to undertake multiple studies of senior leaders, covering topics of organisational resilience, innovation, and corporate governance. The largest of these involved interviews with Chairs of 100 organisations around Australia for the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Ultimately, however, his passion is in education. His early research focused on experiential curriculum design for the development of 21st Century learning and he has been involved in numerous evaluations of school transformation and professional development programs across South Australia, Victoria, the Northern Territory and Malaysia, including multiple studies of Indigenous education. This work has coincided with extensive research on the development of scalable soft skill assessment methods, in partnership with the UN Economic Social Commission Asia Pacific (UNESCAP) and Monash University that is ongoing. Robert holds a first class honours in curriculum development and worldview change, whilst his PhD involved the application of biological systems theory to improving learning and resilience in organisations.

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Dr Katina Tan is a Senior Research Analyst at Incept Labs and a Chartered Accountant. Like Robert, her career has moved between industry and academia. She spent more than 15 years in finance and strategic consulting, beginning in audit and advisory at a Big Four professional services firm before taking on a senior finance leadership role at a sovereign wealth fund. She then served as CFO of an education services company delivering a large-scale public-private partnership with the Malaysian Ministry of Education, where she oversaw the finance, ICT, and administration functions while contributing to the company’s overall strategic direction — including leading a workstream to build the financial literacy of school leaders. Moving into academia, Katina spent six years as a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, working across a portfolio of nationally significant research and evaluation projects. Her work spanned research design, stakeholder management, and the evaluation of large-scale instruments used by universities and systems to support evidence-based decision-making. She also coordinated and lectured in economic evaluation in the Master of Evaluation program and co-supervised postgraduate evaluation projects. At Incept Labs, her current research sits at the intersection of evaluation and emerging technology, including AI-enabled approaches to mapping credentials and evidence of learning against professional standards to support faster, more consistent Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and workforce development.