Tarun Khanna

Since 2010, Tarun Khanna has been the Director of Harvard University's inter-disciplinary South Asia Initiative. He is also the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, and joined the faculty in 1993, after obtaining an engineering degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Harvard, and an interim stint on Wall Street. An expert on emerging markets, he writes extensively in economics and management, is an occasional editorial contributor, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business. He currently teaches in Harvard's executive education programs and is Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India.

Tarun's latest co-authored book is Winning in Emerging Markets: A Roadmap for Strategy and Execution, published in 2010, which outlines a framework for developing market strategies. His previous book published in 2008, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures, and Yours It focuses on the drivers of entrepreneurship in China and India and builds on over a decade of work with companies, investors and non-profits in developing countries worldwide

He serves as a board member of several publicly traded and venture-backed companies worldwide in the financial services, automotive, life sciences and agribusiness sectors, and also of non-profit companies in the U.S. and India. He actively invests in and mentors startups in Asia.

His scholarly work has been published in a range of economics and management journals, several of which he also serves in an editorial capacity. Articles in the Harvard Business Review (e.g. China + India: The Power of Two, 2007; Emerging Giants: Building World Class Companies in Emerging Markets, 2006) and Foreign Policy (e.g. Can India Overtake China, 2003) distil the implications of this research for practicing managers. His work is frequently featured in global newsmagazines as well as on TV and radio.

He also volunteers time with non-profits in India, e.g. the Parliamentary Research Services in New Delhi, which seeks to provide non-partisan research input to India's Members of Parliament in advance of legislative sessions with a view to enhancing the quality of democratic discourse.