Topic: Corporate Strategy

Tarun Khanna

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School. For almost three decades, he has studied entrepreneurship as a means to social and economic development in emerging markets. At HBS since 1993, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and Harvard, he has taught courses on strategy, international business and economic development to undergraduate and graduate students and senior executives.

A summary of his conceptual work on emerging markets appeared in his 2010 co-authored book, Winning in Emerging Markets.  Comparative work on entrepreneurship in China and India appeared in two books based on his personal experiences: Billions in 2008 and a sequel in 2018, Trust.  Recently, he co-edited two collections of essays, one a set of transcripts of original video interviews of iconic entrepreneurial leaders across emerging markets, Leadership to Last, the other most recently, Making Meritocracy, an inter-disciplinary exploration of the roots of meritocracy in China and India, with lessons for entrepreneurship and for much studied societal attributes like dynamism and inequality.

He was named the first director of Harvard’s university-wide Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute in the fall of 2010. The institute rapidly grew to engage over 150 faculty from across Harvard in projects embracing the pure sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, and spanning the region from Afghanistan to Myanmar. A centerpiece of the Institute’s strategy is a deep local presence, anchored through offices in New Delhi and Lahore. During the past decade, he also oversaw HBS activities across South Asia, anchored in Mumbai.

He currently teaches a popular university-wide elective course, Contemporary Developing Countries, where students work in multi-disciplinary teams to devise practical solutions to complex social problems.  The course is part of Harvard’s undergraduate general education core curriculum, and is rare in that it also attracts graduate students from across the university, engaging ‘sophomores to surgeons.’ A free online version on the edX platform, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, has been taken by about three quarters of a million students in over 200 countries.

In 2007, he was nominated Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum, in 2009, elected as a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, in 2016, recognized by the Academy of Management as Eminent Scholar for Lifetime Achievement in the field of International Management.  Between 2015 and 2019, he was appointed to several national commissions by the Government of India, including to chair the effort to frame policies for entrepreneurship in India.

Outside HBS, he serves on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards in the US and India. In the past decade, this included AES, a Washington DC headquartered global power company, and India-based Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited (BFIL), one of the world’s largest firms dedicated to financial inclusion for the poor.  Recently, he joined the board of inMobi, India’s first ‘unicorn,’ a global technology provider of enterprise platforms for marketers.  He is a co-founder of several entrepreneurial ventures in the developing world, spanning India, China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In 2015, he co-founded Axilor, a vibrant incubator in Bangalore. From 2015 to 2022, he was a Trustee of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

He lives in Newton, MA, with his wife, daughter and son.

Chan Kim

W. Chan Kim is Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and The Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD, France (the world's second largest business school). Prior to joining INSEAD, he was a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, USA. He has served as a board member as well as an advisor for a number of multinational corporations in Europe, the U.S. and Pacific Asia. He is an advisory member for the European Union and serves as an advisor to several countries. He was born in Korea.

Kim is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. His Harvard Business Review articles, co-authored with Renée Mauborgne, are worldwide bestsellers and have sold over half a million reprints. Their Value Innovation and Fair Process articles were selected as among the best classic articles ever published in Harvard Business Review. They have co-authored articles in The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Asian Wall Street Journal, amongst others.

Kim has published numerous articles on strategy and managing the multinational which can be found in: Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of International Business Studies, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and others. The Journal of International Management recognizes Kim as one of the world’s most influential academic journal authors in global strategy. He is the co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). Blue Ocean Strategy has become an "International Bestseller," after reaching the "Wall Street Journal Bestseller," "BusinessWeek Bestseller," and "National (American) Bestseller" status. It has sold over two million copies and is being published in a record-breaking 42 languages. It is a best seller across 5 continents. Blue Ocean Strategy won the Best Business Book of 2005 Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was also selected as the number one Strategy Book of 2005 by Strategy + Business, Booz Allen & Hamilton's leading business magazine, and as a Top Ten Business Book of 2005 by Amazon.com.

Kim received the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Leadership on Business and Economic Thinking 2008 and is a winner of the Eldridge Haynes Prize, awarded by the Academy of International Business and the Eldridge Haynes Memorial Trust of Business International, for the best original paper in the field of international business. After being among the top five most influential business thinkers in 2009, Professor Kim was ranked No. 2 on The Thinkers50 2011 list of the world's top management gurus. He also won the 2011 Thinkers50 Strategy Award for his research on Blue Ocean Strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy was recognized as the business book of the last decade. Professor Kim was selected for the 2011 Leadership Hall of Fame by FastCompany magazine for his book, Blue Ocean Strategy.

He is the winner of the Prix DCF 2009 (Prix des Dirigeants Commerciaux de France 2009) in the category of « Stratégie d’entreprise ». L'Expansion also named Kim along with his colleague Renée Mauborgne as "the number one gurus of the future". The Sunday Times (London) called them "two of Europe's brightest business thinkers. Kim and Mauborgne provide a sizable challenge to the way managers think about and practice strategy. The Observer called Kim and Mauborgne, "the next big gurus to hit the business world." Kim is the winner of several European Case Clearing House awards including 'Best Case in Strategy' and 'Best Overall Case' across all disciplines.

Kim co-founded the Blue Ocean Strategy Network (BOSN), a global community of practice on the Blue Ocean Strategy family of concepts that they created. BOSN embraces academics, consultants, executives, and government officers.