Dean
S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research
Dr. Varun Nagaraj has joined SPJIMR after a 30-year career in product innovation in Boston and Silicon Valley, during which he held CEO and other executive leadership roles at several venture-funded start-ups and public companies developing communications, computing, IoT, and AI products. He was also a partner at PRTM Management Consulting (now part of PwC), working with Fortune 1000 companies on their organizational innovation initiatives.
He holds a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, a Masters in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, an MBA from Boston University, and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management.
Dr. Nagaraj’s research on how teams learn and innovate in unfamiliar contexts has been published in the Academy of Management (AOM) proceedings and in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), and is featured in the upcoming 2021 Handbook of Digital Entrepreneurship.
As a teacher, Dr. Nagaraj brings a lively mix of practice and theory to the classroom, and has developed and taught MBA, masters, and undergraduate classes on digital transformation and product management at Boston University (on the edX MOOC platform), Pepperdine University, and the University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Nagaraj has recently been elected to serve as the Practitioner-at-large for the Academy of Management’s Organizational Communications and Information Systems (OCIS) division.