Dr. Gabi Anja Kaffka

Dr. Gabi A. Kaffka obtained her Master degree in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam in 2007. In the same year, she joined the trainee pool of the Municipality of Amsterdam where she became policy advisor and coordinated various projects in socio-economic neighbourhood development. She was also programme assistant for the Award-winning European project ‘Green and Blue Space Adaptation for Urban Areas and Ecotowns’ (GRaBS).

In 2010, Gabi started her PhD research in the field of entrepreneurship at the University of Twente, focusing on social cognitive development of entrepreneurs in a high-tech business incubator, the award-winning Venture Lab Twente which has expanded internationally. In 2020, Gabi received an award for Best Empirical Paper from the Academy of Management (Entrepreneurship Division), for her research on the role of critical feedback in (meta)cognitive development of entrepreneurs.

During the last years, Gabi worked as consultant and lecturer. For example, she designed an action scan for public-private learning communities in vocational and higher education. Since 2015, she has been involved in the project HEInnovate (a joint project of the EC and OECD) on best practices in entrepreneurial teaching and learning in higher education in Ireland and the Netherlands. Between 2016 and 2017, she was employed by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) in Ireland.

In 2018, Gabi started as project manager of the EU project ‘Evaluation of Entrepreneurship Education Programmes in Higher Education’ which resulted in the EPIC tool. EPIC is an online, free-of-charge, easy-to-use tool for making customized questionnaires for impact assessment of entrepreneurship education programmes in higher education and beyond.

More recently, Gabi also lectured at the School of Economics of the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) and currently pursues postdoctoral research on the topic of lifelong learning for the knowledge alliance, a collaborative effort of the Academic Hospital Utrecht (UMC, Utrecht University, Wageningen University and the Technical University Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Since 2017, Gabi is member of the network of independent experts in education for the European Commission (DG EAC) where she reports on recent policy developments in the Dutch educational sector.

Gabi’s expertise is in the field of cognitive development of entrepreneurs; entrepreneurship education; and entrepreneurial teaching and learning most broadly. Interested in knowing more? Please get in touch!