Onya is Lecturer in Prosperity, Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Co-Programme leader of the MSc in Prosperity, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at University College London Institute for Global Prosperity. Her research interest lies at the intersection of creativity and innovation and entrepreneurship studies. Onya is interested in the emergence of novelty, particularly within constrained settings. She explores this firstly, through studying how cognitive-affective processes influence creativity and innovation. She is currently studying how the use of new technologies can impact creativity and the imagination and enable the generation of new ways of organising. Secondly, she is interested in how novel business models are formed, particularly how developmental entrepreneurship models that have a transformative impact on communities and regions emerge. She is part of a team of researchers studying how regenerative innovations emerge and transform the innovation economy within a region.

At THE NEW INSTITUTE, Onyaglanu is involved in the Africapitalism: Shared Entrepreneurship for Economic Development program in the Academic Year 2024/25.