By Torben Haugaard Jensen, Communications Officer, AAU Business School

Members of assessment committee were:

• Associate Professor Jonas Eduardsen, Aalborg University Business School, Chair
• Professor Lettice Rutashobya, University of Dar es salaam, Tanzania
• Professor Per Servais, Ekonomihögskolan, Linnéuniversitet, Sweden

Principal supervisor: Professor Emeritus Olav Jull Sørensen, Access2Innovation, and the moderator of the session was Associate Professor Mohammad Bakhtiar Rana, Aalborg University Business School.

Samuel Yaw Akomea was previously enrolled as a PhD student at Aalborg University, but is now a Senior Lecturer at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana from where he submitted his PhD-thesis.

Summary of the Thesis

The thesis investigates how organizational capabilities impact on export performance, using data from 298 exporters in Ghana. This direct relationship was detailed by examining the mediating role of market orientation and innovation on export performance. Furthermore, the contingency roles of competitive intensity was also investigated in the indirect link between organizational capabilities and export performance.

Exports and export performance have continuously been a challenge for growing the Ghanaian economy, especially in case of non-traditional products and the background and idea of the study and thesis was to on internal factors of the exporters to identify weaknesses and possible solutions to overcome weaknesses in firms and how to overcome them.

The findings will be disseminated through the marketing teaching by Sam Yaw Akomea and also through his position and the head of the Business development Centre and incubator at KNUST.