Margaret Thatcher Professor of Enterprise Studies in Innovation & Growth
Cambridge Judge Business School · Co-Director of the Entrepreneurship Centre
Professor Stylianos "Stelios" Kavadias studies one of the hardest problems in management: how organisations — from global corporates to scrappy startups — actually turn strategy into innovation and growth. His work spans the cascading of strategy into goals, the design of innovation portfolios, transformative business models, and the organisational incentives that make new ideas survive contact with reality.
Trained as an engineer at the National Technical University of Athens and as a management scientist at INSEAD (MSc, PhD), he moves fluently between qualitative case research, lab experiments, econometrics, and mathematical modelling — always in pursuit of insights that managers can genuinely use.
“The transformative business model is not about technology alone — it is about redefining what the customer pays for, and how value is created and captured.”— After Kavadias, Ladas & Loch, Harvard Business Review (2016)
How high-level strategy translates into functional strategies, objectives, and goals that people can actually execute.
Choosing the "right" portfolio of new projects and products — from project selection to deliberate portfolio design.
What makes a business model genuinely transformative — his six-key framework from HBR is used in boardrooms worldwide.
Effective ideation, pivoting, and experimentation processes — how organisations search for the best alternative under complexity.
Organisational design and incentive schemes that produce innovation outcomes rather than innovation theatre.
Co-founded the School's Entrepreneurship Centre, where he serves as Academic Co-Director alongside Professor Matthew Grimes. Directs the Advanced Leadership Programme in Executive Education, working with clients from HSBC and Barclays to the Prime Minister's Office of the UAE.
Associate Professor of Operations Management; directed the Denning T&M Programme and the GE Energy Project Leadership Management Programme.
Fellow at the Batten Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Doctoral training in management science, following an engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens.
Beyond his own research, Professor Kavadias shapes what the whole field reads. He serves as Department Editor for Management Science's Entrepreneurship & Innovation department, and as Associate Editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Production and Operations Management — having previously led POM's R&D, New Product Development and Project Management department.