Professor Kwaku Atuahene-Gima

He is a product of Acherensua Secondary School (1968-1973), St. Stanislas College, Poperinge, Belgium (1973 – 1974), Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast (1974-1976), the University of Ghana (1976 – 1979), the University of New South Wales (1987-1989), and the University of Wollongong (1989 – 1992), both in Australia.

Kwaku founded NiBS in July 2014, a business school focusing uniquely on doctoral education for experienced executives in Accra, Ghana. NiBS is the first doctoral business school in Africa and is well-known for its innovative, executive-friendly program design and delivery. NiBS flips the traditional university model by being the first business school in the world to start operations with a doctorate program designed to meet the unique needs of experienced executives.

Before founding NiBS, he was an Innovation Management & Marketing professor at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai Shanghai, for ten years. At CEIBS, he was the founding Director of the Centre for Marketing & Innovation, funded by Dow Chemical Corporation. He served as Head of the new Marketing Department for five years. He researched and developed the start-up strategy for CEIBS Africa Campus in Accra, Ghana, and served as its Executive Director for five years. He launched a new executive friendly EMBA program and the Women Entrepreneurship and Leadership for Africa (WELA) program to rejuvenate the role of women in African business. At the City University of Hong Kong, he was the Founding Director of the Centre for Innovation Management and Organizational Change and Chair of the Department of Management for four years.

Kwaku ranked in 2012 as the Number two innovation management scholar worldwide based on single- authored research papers published in the Top 10 business and management journals. The Stanford University research team lists Kwaku among the world's top 2% of scientists for four consecutive years (2020-2023). The report contains scientists whose published research has made the most outstanding contribution to knowledge in their respective fields. In the business and management discipline, the 2020 report ranked Kwaku in the Top 150 of the over 36,000 top 2% of scientists.

Kwaku ranks among the world's Top 10 doctoral marketing faculty (based on the most cited research papers in marketing by Ph.D. and other postgraduate students. He ranks among the top 20 scholars worldwide with the most citations in the entrepreneurship literature. According to the European Union, Kwaku is one of Ghana's leading scientists, based on the number of Google citations. In June 2006, he was a faculty participant in executive education on innovation at the Harvard Business School.

Kwaku is the first and the only African scholar ever to have served on the American Journal of Marketing Editorial Review Board, the world's leading marketing journal from July 2006 to June 2014. Kwaku is also a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), the world's leading innovation journal. Kwaku was appointed a member of the International Expert Panel of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) in November 2015.

With his two co-authors, he won the Thomas Hustad Best Paper award in November 2015 for the best research paper published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM). On July 23rd, 2010, he received the Best Professor in Marketing and Innovation Management award at Asia's Best Business Schools Awards by CMO in Singapore. He has won multiple Best Paper awards at the American Marketing Association conferences. In particular, in 2007, he won the prestigious TECHSIG award for contributions to knowledge in innovation and technology for his paper published in the American Journal of Marketing in October 2005.

Kwaku has published in several of the world's most prestigious FT50 academic journals in business and management, such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Marketing, Organization Science, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, and the world's leading innovation journals, the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Kwaku has over 30 years of experience in consulting and executive development. He consults and trains executives to develop innovation, strategy, leadership, entrepreneurship, and marketing across several industries and countries. His African corporate clients include the Volta River Authority (VRA), Vodafone, Stanbic IBTC Bank, Lagos, MTN, Fidelity Bank, Life-Forms Ltd, and American Tower Company. His international clients over the years in China and around the world include AutoNavi, Dow Chemical, Barco, Trend Micro Inc, Philips - China, GE - China, Lenovo, Trend Micro Inc., WPP, Sanofi-Aventis, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, Danaher, DSM, Sony, Eli Lilly, Bayer Technology Services, Ernst & Young - China, Alcatel-Lucent, GSK, UBS Financial Services; Guangdong Development Bank, Shanghai
General Motors, and Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC) where he developed the Enterprise Innovation Management Model (EIMM)) - an innovation capability assessment and improvement tool for use by its consultants.

Kwaku is a member of the Speakers Academy, an international body of speakers sought after by companies. Kwaku was a keynote speaker at the Ghana Business Awards in 2019; Vodafone Africa SME Summit, Nov. 2015 in Accra; moderated the inaugural Ghana Economic Forum in Accra in March 2013, given keynote speeches at the Vodafone African Leaders Forum; Ministry of Economy and Innovation of Portugal forum on SME Entrepreneurship, the Economist Ghana Summit, the China Information Industry R&D Forum in Beijing, Hong Kong Coalition of Service Industries, and several other conferences. Kwaku has been interviewed by, and/or written for, the Financial Times of London, International Herald Tribune, the 21 Century Business Herald, Global Entrepreneur, China Daily, the Economist, BBC, CCTV, El Mundo of Spain, China Business News, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Africa Business, New African Magazine, Dragon TV, GBCTV, Metro TV, Joy FM, Citi FM, CNBC, France AITV, STARR FM, and several leading media houses.