Sankaran Venkataraman

Sankaran Venkataraman

MasterCard Professor of Business Administration
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research

Office

FOB 288

Areas of Expertise

Entrepreneurial Opportunity, Business Strategy, Corporate Strategy, Corporate Venturing, New Venture Creation and Financing, Regional Development, Entrepreneurship Education, Managing Growth

Education: M.A., Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India; MBA, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; Ph.D., University of Minnesota

Sankaran Venkataraman ("Venkat") is the MasterCard Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean for faculty and research at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He is a member of the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Ethics area at Darden and teaches MBA and executive level courses in strategy, entrepreneurship and ethics. He is an internationally renowned scholar and educator in the field of entrepreneurship. He has published extensively and has lectured around the world. He has earned the Outstanding Faculty Award at Darden and was voted the "Most Popular Professor" at Business Week Online based on a poll of Darden students. The Academy of Management, the largest professional body of management educators in the world, has recognized his research by awarding him the inaugural IDEA award for Foundational Research in entrepreneurship and, in 2010, the Academy of Management Review (a leading journal of the Academy) cited one of his papers as the most influential in the past decade from among the papers published in that journal.

As a corporate planning executive in a major Indian firm, he was a part of a founding team that created and developed a highly successful new business venture. He consults with Fortune 500 firms as well as several small companies. He facilitates strategy discussion for firms and is an adviser to firms, universities and government organizations. He has been a speaker for and adviser to the Entrepreneurial Forum, a program of the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce aimed at promoting trade through entrepreneurship around the world. He is a faculty in numerous executive education programs at Darden and the Indian School of Business, and is on the faculty team of The Executive Program.

Venkataraman was the first holder of the Bruggeman Distinguished Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and, from 1989 to 1995, he was Paul Yeakel Term Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School. He received his M.A. in economics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India; his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta); and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Sankaran Venkataraman's Ideas to Action Posts

Leading in a Flat and Lumpy World

Entrepreneurship & Innovation

 

Selected Publications

Venkataraman, S., S. D. Sarasvathy, N. Dew and W. Forster. "Of Narratives and Artifacts,"  Academy of Management Review, Vol. 38, no. 1, (January 2013), p. 163-166.

Venkataraman, S., S. D. Sarasvathy, N. Dew, and W. Forster. "Reflections on the 2012 AMR Decade Award: Whither the Promise? Moving Forward with Entrepreneurship as a Science of the Artificial," Academy of Management Review, Vol. 37, no. 1 (January 2012), p. 21-33.

Venkataraman, S., S. D. Sarasvathy, N. Dew, and W. Forster. "Whither the Promise: Moving Forward with Entrepreneurship as a Science of the Artificial,"  Academy of Management Review, Vol. 37, no. 1 (January 2012), p. 21-33.

Sarasvathy, S. D. and S. Venkataraman. "Entrepreneurship as Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future."  Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Vol. 35, no. 1 (January 2011), p. 113-135. 

S. D. Sarasvathy, N. Dew, R. Velamuri, S. Venkataraman. "Three Views of Entrepreneurial Opportunity," in Handbook of Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Survey and Introduction," Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch (Editors), 2nd Edition, Springer, (August 2010), 77-96. 

York, J. G. and S. Venkataraman. "The Entrepreneur-Environment Nexus: Uncertainty, Innovation and Allocation," Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 25, no. 5, (September 2010), 449-463.

 

Selected Books

Phan, P.,  S. Venkataraman, and S. R. Velamuri. Entrepreneurship in the Emerging Regions Around the World: Theory, Evidence and Implications. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008.

Van de Ven, A. H., D. E. Polley, R. Garud, and S. Venkataraman.The Innovation Journey. Oxford University Press, 2008.

 

Case Studies

Advancing knowledge through research that shapes business, Darden professors are recognized thought leaders in their fields. They are not only master case method teachers, they also author many of the cases used in Darden classrooms and around the world.

Sankaran Venkataraman's cases are available in the Darden Business Publishing website.