Dr. Gordon Kwesi Adomdza is an Associate Professor of Management Practice and Director of CEIBS Africa at CEIBS. Before joining CEIBS, he held the position of Associate Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Ashesi University in Ghana. Dr. Adomdza earned a Ph.D. in Management of Technology, an M.A.Sc in Management Science, and an M.A. in Applied Economics from the University of Waterloo. He also holds a B.A. Hons in Economics from the University of Ghana.

At Ashesi, Prof. Adomdza led the implementation of the university’s one-year mandatory entrepreneurship course for its first years – Foundations of Design & Entrepreneurship – for 7 years. In addition to curricular entrepreneurship programs, he also spearheaded several initiatives to develop the extracurricular entrepreneurial ecosystem of the University. These included the Ashesi Design Lab, Ashesi Startup Launchpad and Ashesi Venture Incubator which he implemented as the Co-Principal Investigator and Program Director of a $1m USAID-funded grant program in conjunction with MIT D-Lab. Consequently, he became the first faculty lead of the Ashesi Centre for Entrepreneurship, which became the organizing platform for these initiatives. In the classroom, he taught new product development and competitive strategy to third and final-year students. Recently, he led the development of the Ashesi MBA program through program research and design, stakeholder validation, and successfully receiving national accreditation for the launch of the program.

Prof. Gordon Adomdza’s research interests concentrate on the areas of opportunity recognition, validation and exploitation with a special focus on the role of the design approach in new idea development and the customer development process to establish business models. Based on his PhD work, he also explores national policy guidance and its impact on the commercialization of research science and technology. 

Outside of campus, Prof. Adomdza coordinates a group of professionals at the Design Thinking Ghana Hub to provide design thinking capacity building and conduct new product development projects in industry. Prof. Adomdza also supports The Startup Traction Project, which helps entrepreneurs and businesses develop experiments to test their ideas faster and more cheaply before they spend significant amounts of money.