Professor Valente has consulted for the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development, and the United Nations on topics related to private sector sustainable development in the global south.

Prior to his academic career, Professor Valente worked in sport management as a general manager at the Sydney Olympic Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.

Professor Valente's research revolves around the relationship between business and sustainability; defined broadly as the private sector's role in maintaining the integrity of social, ecological, and economic systems over space and time. His PhD dissertation examined how companies in the global south embed sustainability into their strategies. His findings point to the need to adopt structures, processes, and perspectives across individual, firm, and inter-organizational levels of analysis.. He examines this phenomenon in environments where firms face contradictions in institutional logics; those contexts where firms are forced to balance market and non-market expectations. Here, organizations learn to cope with a complex reality where the exclusive maximization of economic rents that characterizes the conventional theory of the firm is inadequate to guide firm behaviour. Dr. Valente extends this line of thinking to suggest that the underlying paradigm guiding frameworks in strategic management is incommensurable to principles of sustainable development and that any full adoption of sustainability at the firm level requires entrepreneurial behaviour that questions accepted practices at the institutional level.