Paul Cubbon

Paul Cubbon serves as Assistant Dean of Innovation at UBC Sauder School of Business, where he leads groundbreaking initiatives in entrepreneurship education and innovation. After earning his BA Honours from Oxford University and MBA from Simon Fraser University, he built an impressive career spanning advertising at J. Walter Thompson and a decade with Unilever before transitioning to education. As a multiple award-winning educator, including the prestigious Sauder School "Talking Stick" for pedagogical innovation, he has transformed entrepreneurship education through his work with the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) Vancouver, where he served as site lead from 2016 to 2022. His teaching philosophy emphasizes practical application, focusing on helping scientific inventors scale their impact in human and planetary health. Through his leadership at CDL, he has pioneered a "marketplace for judgment" approach, helping first-time founders navigate complex business decisions. His expertise extends beyond academia through extensive consulting work, where he helps organizations break down seemingly insurmountable challenges into solvable components. Cubbon's impact on innovation education is particularly evident in his cross-faculty collaborations, where he focuses on customer discovery and business model validation with STEM researchers, creating bridges between academic research and commercial applications. His vision for innovation emphasizes the importance of combining top-down and bottom-up change, while advocating for reducing bureaucratic friction to accelerate progress in solving global challenges.