Hanadi Jabado

Hanadi is passionate about entrepreneurship and innovation. A serial entrepreneur herself, she has a strong understanding of the needs of early stage ventures and entrepreneurs. Her areas of interests cover a wide range of industries, covering traditional sectors such as education, and more cutting edge technology sectors such as Biotech.

In 2012, Hanadi was inspiration and the driving force behind the creation of Accelerate Cambridge, enhancing the contribution of Cambridge Judge Business School to the Cambridge entrepreneurial cluster, by providing help, nurture, and support to innovators and entrepreneurs in Cambridge. She has coined the "sneak outs" phrase, describing IP out of the University of Cambridge being commercialised directly by the inventor. Since its creation, Accelerate Cambridge has supported over a hundred companies and Hanadi has personally been involved in raising 10 million pounds of equity and grant funding for the Accelerate Cambridge startups.

Early in 2016 Hanadi was appointed the Executive Director of the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge. The Centre's mission is to develop practical and academic entrepreneurship programmes supporting budding entrepreneurs and fledging companies from pre-idea all the way to growth. Hanadi has also been instrumental in the recent launch of the SME Growth Challenge programme which expands the Centre’s offering to scale-ups and high-growth companies. She is a co-organiser of the Darden-Judge academic conference on entrepreneurship.

Hanadi is often invited as a guest speaker on forums, debates and conferences on the topic of entrepreneurship. In 2016 her work to support entrepreneurs earned her recognition as one of the Maserati100.

Hanadi sits on the advisory board of several startups at various stages of development and growth and is a director of Pitch@Palace CIC.

Her work in Cambridge is already enabling a unique platform for entrepreneurship research ranging from case studies of start-ups, scale-ups all the way to industry reports and longitudinal studies of the underpinning factors of entrepreneurial success from both the entrepreneur's and the early investor's perspectives. She has co-authored a series of articles on SME growth case studies on various facets of the entrepreneurial struggles, and is currently developing a book on early stage ventures with Professor Stelios Kavadias.

Born in Lebanon and raised in France, she is fluent in English, French and Arabic and speaks another four languages. She lives in Cambridge with her four children.