Dr. Gordon Kwesi Adomdza is an Associate Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Ashesi University, Ghana. Previously, he taught design thinking and entrepreneurship at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, at Northeastern University, Boston, MA for 7 years. Dr. Adomdza graduated from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada with a Ph.D in Management of Technology, an MASc in Management Science and MA in Applied Economics. He is also a graduate of the University of Ghana with a BA Hons in Economics.

At Ashesi, he led the implementation of the university’s one-year mandatory entrepreneurship course for first years – Foundations of Design & Entrepreneurship – for 7 years. He also teaches new product development and competitive strategy to third and final-year students. His teaching philosophy is built around the analogy of a Coach with a Toolbox. A coach presents a unifying goal and helps his/her students to systematically develop the skills and abilities they possess to meet this goal. Drawing from the role of the coach, the basic themes for his teaching philosophy include, creating and sustaining interest, encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving, promoting effective communication and interaction and ensuring the use of the next and best technology. He is the immediate past faculty lead of the Ashesi Centre for Entrepreneurship.

He was also the Program Director for the USAID-funded $1m New Entrepreneurs Xchange for Transformation (NEXT) program, which among other goals, established the Ashesi Venture Incubator in conjunction with MIT D-Lab. He also leads the Ashesi Design Lab, which supports faculty, staff and student projects outside of the classroom with consulting in design thinking methodology. Currently, he leads the development of the upcoming Ashesi MBA program.

His research interests are in the areas of opportunity recognition and validation with a special focus on the role of the Design Thinking approach in new idea development and the customer development process to establish business models. From another angle, he also explores policy guidance in the commercialization of research science and technology.

Outside of campus, Dr. 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. Dr. Adomdza also runs 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.