Mr Walker is a start-up coach at Dunedin's Upstart Business Incubator, and he is enjoying the job "immensely".
A non-profit entity owned by the Dunedin City Council, University of Otago and Otago Polytechnic, Upstart is one of only seven New Zealand Trade and Enterprise-sponsored incubators in New Zealand.
It has been helping high-growth companies get started since 2004, by providing incubation and angel investment services.
Successful graduates include award-winning technology start-up companies such as TracMap New Zealand Ltd, TracPlus Global Ltd and Innovative Learning.
Born and raised in Dunedin, where he was educated at Otago Boys' High School, Mr Walker left the city when he was 17.
He joined the police force for 10 years and served in Auckland, then decided he wanted to further his career in terms of both education and financially.
He started selling computers and then worked his way up the corporate ladder, making himself available to move.
He moved "from country to country, position to position", and each position was a step further up the ladder.
He has a master of business degree in information technology management from the University of Technology in Sydney.
During two decades in Asia, Mr Walker has used up seven passports. He has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore, and also periodically in Beijing, Shanghai, New Delhi and Bhubaneswar.
He enjoyed the different cultures and the differences in business practices between the cultures.
While it could be challenging, technology was now the international language of the world, he said.
He joked that he learned enough Mandarin and Cantonese to order the wrong dish on the menu in restaurants.
It was an "absolutely brilliant" time, full of challenges and adventures. He even took up golf when he discovered that some Asian business people did more business on the golf course than in the office.
He always told people recruited to work in Asia that they needed to appreciate the differences and then understand why they existed.
When Mr Walker returned to New Zealand for family reasons, he found the opportunities in Dunedin to be "far bigger" than he expected.
He believed the Dunedin business ecosystem, combined with the learning ecosystem, was a "phenomenal opportunity" to launch businesses by providing proof of concept and proof of commercialisation.
What needed to be understood was that the world moved "considerably faster", and so speed to market had to be much quicker and funding much more readily available, but in a professional manner, he said.
Speed to market was a critical success factor that needed to be developed in Dunedin.
Asia knew about speed to market. It did not mean haste, but rather thorough preparation and then launching with no hesitation.
In his role, Mr Walker was applying his own business experience, and the knowledge he had gained over the past 20 years offshore, to business opportunities in Dunedin.
It was a very interesting job which involved suggesting, guiding and coaching, "but the decisions are theirs".
"I'm not running the business," he said.
Listening was a major part. He had to extract what the client wanted to do, how they were going to do it and the outcome they wanted to achieve.
Mr Walker, who was always looking for new clients, said Upstart was in "a very good take-off position" and it was starting to move along "a really positive track".
"I think [in] the next three years you'll see considerable growth out of Upstart."
Mr Walker was enjoying being back in Dunedin, saying it was a totally different pace of life and the quality of life was "very hard to match".
After all the years in Asia, it was a "totally different" environment to come home to - a green and pristine countryside, he said.
