Haya Al-Dajani

Dr Haya Al-Dajani is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of the MBA’s Signature Learning Experience at the Mohammed Bin Salman College for Business and Entrepreneurship (MBSC). Haya earned her PhD in entrepreneurship from the University of Strathclyde in the United Kingdom in 2007. Since then, she has held academic posts at the University of East Anglia and the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom and has secured over two million GBPs in research funding from world leading international funding bodies. Her award winning research focuses upon the intersectionality of gender, entrepreneurship and empowerment, and their collective impact on sustainable development. Within this research arena, Haya works on women’s entrepreneurship, cultural heritage entrepreneurship, refugee entrepreneurship, social innovation for poverty alleviation, and enabling entrepreneurship, to understand how entrepreneurship can be a vehicle and catalyst for sustainable development. Her research has been published in leading academic journals including the British Journal of Management, International Small Business Journal, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development and Gender, Work and Organisation.

Haya launched and led the Responsible Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation research group (RESI) at the University of Plymouth and currently co-chairs the international Gender and Enterprise Network; a special interest group of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE). Her engaged scholarship philosophy led her to initiate and launch the ‘Women, Research and Enterprise Forum’ (WREF) at the University of East Anglia and the University of Plymouth Women’s Network. She is a member of Editorial Boards of leading entrepreneurship journals, and an advisor to several entrepreneurship education, research and policy centres around the world. The entrepreneurship training programs she designed and developed have been delivered to over six million people globally and are available in ten languages.

At MBSC, Haya’s teaching focuses on the MBA Signature Learning Experience (SLE). Embedded within Babson College’s Entrepreneurial Thought and Action® steps and processes, the SLE provides bespoke and immersive student-centric experiential entrepreneurship learning, relevant to the Saudi context.