Rishikesha T. Krishnan
From 1996 to 2013, Professor Krishnan was a member of the faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), India.
Professor Krishnan was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania (Fall 2008), and at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad (2011-12). He held the Jamuna Raghavan Chair in Entrepreneurship at IIMB from 2007-10.
Professor Krishnan’s main areas of interest are strategy and innovation. He was listed among the Thinkers50 India most influential thinkers in management from India (2013) and jointly received the special Thinkers50 India Innovation award (2013). Earlier, he received the Dewang Mehta Award for Best Teacher in Strategic Management in 2010.
Professor Krishnan has served on a number of committees set up by the Government of India, Nasscom and CII related to innovation in India. He is on the board of Sundaram Asset Management Company Ltd., and is a trustee of the Foundation for Excellence India Trust (www.ffe.org ), an organization committed to helping economically underprivileged and academically talented students complete their higher education through one of India’s largest scholarship programmes.
Professor Krishnan writes extensively, and has more than 140 publications spanning outlets that include refereed journals, the popular press, case studies, book chapters, and books.
Professor Krishnan’s book From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India, published in February 2010 identified the challenges faced by India in enhancing industrial innovation and proposed an agenda to enhance innovation output (see http://jugaadtoinnovation.blogspot.com for details and updates). In his comments on the book jacket, MindTree Chairman Subroto Bagchi wrote: “Rishikesha Krishnan is doubtlessly among India’s foremost chroniclers of the innovation journey. His book is a great account of the history of innovation in the post-industrial era. He has his pulse on issues that hold Indians from going to the next level.”
Professor Krishnan’s recent book, 8 Steps to Innovation: Going from Jugaad to Excellence (co-authored with Vinay Dabholkar, and published by Harper Collins in March 2013), outlines a systematic path for organizations to build innovation capabilities.
Professor Krishnan holds an M.Sc. in Physics (5-year Integrated Programme) from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur; and an M.S. in Engineering-Economic Systems (now Management Science & Engineering) from Stanford University. He obtained his doctorate from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, where he won the outstanding thesis proposal award instituted by the Industrial Finance Corporation of India.
