Saras D. Sarasvathy
Paul M. Hammaker Professor in Business Administration
Jamuna Raghavan Chair Professor in Entrepreneurship, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Education: B.Com., University of Bombay, India; MSIA, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
Professor Saras D. Sarasvathy is a member of the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Ethics area. In addition to MBA and doctoral courses in entrepreneurship at Darden, she teaches in doctoral programs in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. In 2007, Sarasvathy was named one of the top 18 entrepreneurship professors by Fortune Small Business magazine. In 2013, Babson College awarded her an honorary doctorate for the impact of her work on entrepreneurship education. Most recently, in recognition of her active engagement with students, Sarasvathy became the 2015 Mead-Colley Honored Faculty from UVA.
Universities around the world recognize her contributions to entrepreneurship research and education by awarding her the following professorships:
- Jamuna Raghavan Chair at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
- University Chair from Nankai University in Tianjin, China
- Jubilee professorship from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden.
A leading scholar on the cognitive basis for high-performance entrepreneurship, Sarasvathy has served on the editorial boards of top management journals and as associate editor of top entrepreneurship journals. Her scholarly work has won several awards, including the 2009 and 2015 Gerald E. Hills Best Paper Awards from the American Marketing Association and the Foundational Paper Award from the Academy of Management in 2017. Her book Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise was nominated for the 2009 Terry Book Award by the Academy of Management.
Effectuation is widely acclaimed as a rigorous framework for understanding the creation and growth of new organizations and markets. The research program based on effectuation involves over a hundred scholars from around the world whose published and working papers can be found at www.effectuation.org. Sarasvathy has also developed several cases and other instructional materials to teach effectuation. Her co-authored textbook Effectual Entrepreneurship won the Gold Medal in the 2012 Axiom Business Book Awards.
Sarasvathy serves on the board of Lending Tree(Nasdaq TREE) as well as on advisory boards for academic institutions in Europe and Asia. In addition to a master's degree in industrial administration, Sarasvathy received her Ph.D. in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University. Her thesis on entrepreneurial expertise was supervised by Herbert Simon,1978 Nobel Laureate in Economics. Click here for her SSRN Author Page, her TEDx talk, a video interview with Big Think, a webinar from the World Bank and one from the Academy of Management.
Saras D. Sarasvathy's Ideas to Action Posts
Selected Publications
Sarasvathy, S.D. "Competitive Advantages and Entrepreneurial Opportunities," Revue Francaise de Gestion (French Journal of Management), forthcoming.
Sarasvathy, S.D. "Herbert Simon," in Les grands inspirateurs de la theorie des organisations, G. Olivier Editor, series published by Editions Management et Societe (EMS) France, forthcoming.
Sarasvathy, S.D. "MAZES without Minotaurs: Herbert Simon and the Sciences of the Artificial,"European Management Journal, Vol. 31, 2013, 82-87.
Kalinic, I., S.D. Sarasvathy and C. Forza. "'Expect the Unexpected': Implications of Effectual Logic on the Internationalization Process," International Business Review, 23(3), 635-647.
Sarasvathy, S.D., K. Kumar, J. York and S. Bhagavatula. "An Effectual Approach to International Entrepreneurship: Overlaps, Challenges, and Provocative Possibilities," Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, 38(1), 71-93.
Saras D. Sarasvathy, A. R. Menon and G. Kuechle. "Failing Firms and Successful Entrepreneurs: Serial Entrepreneurship as a Temporal Portfolio," Small Business Economics, Vol. 40, No. 2, 417-434.
Sarasvathy, S.D. "Causation and Effectuation: Toward a Theoretical Shift from Economic Inevitability to Entrepreneurial Contingency," Academy of Management Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2013, 243-288.
Saras D. Sarasvathy and W. Forster. "Entrepreneurial Decision Making," Academy of Management Annals, 2013.
Sarasvathy, S.D. and W. Forster. "The Ordinary Entrepreneur," in The Routledge Companion to Entrepreneurship, edited by Friederike Welter and Ted Baker, published by Routledge.
Venkataraman, S., Saras D. Sarasvathy, N. Dew and W. Forster. "Of Narratives and Artifacts,"Academy of Management Review, Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2013, 163-166.
York, Jeffrey, Saras Sarasvathy and Andrew Wicks. "An Entrepreneurial Perspective on Value Creation in Public Private Ventures," in Academy of Management Review, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2013.
Sarasvathy, S.D. and W. Forster. "From Goldilocks to Gump: A Research Agenda for Entrepreneurial Mechanisms Design," in The Routledge Companion to Entrepreneurship, edited by Friederike Welter and Ted Baker, published by Routledge.
Harmeling, S. and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "When Contingency is a Resource: Education Entrepreneurs in the Balkans, the Bronx and Beyond," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, July 2013, Vol 37, No 713-744.
De Colle, S., A. Henriques and S.D. Sarasvathy. "The Paradox of CSR Standards," Journal of Business Ethics, 2013.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. Danish Translation of "What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial,"Kognition und Pedagogik.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. "Worldmaking." In Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth. Vol. 14, edited by Andrew C. Corbett and Jerome Katz, 2012.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. "Corporate Entrepreneurship." In Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management Theory, edited by David Teece and Mie Augier. 2012.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. "Effectuation." In Encyclopedia of Management Theory, edited by Eric Kessler. Sage Publications, 2012.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. "Organizational Identification." In Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management Theory, edited by David Teece and Mie Augier. 2012.
Sarasvathy, Saras. D. and S. Read. "Co-Creating a Course Ahead From the Intersection of Service Dominant Logic and Effectuation," Marketing Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2012, 225-229.
Venkataraman, S., Saras 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, 21-33.
Venkataraman, S., Saras 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, 21-33.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. "Effectual Entrepreneurship." In Enterprise and Small Business: Principles, Policy and Practice," edited by Sara Carter and Dylan Jones-Evans. Financial Times. Prentice Hall, 2011.
Stuart Read and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "Finding a Niche: Stationery for Gents," Lessons in Entrepreneurship Series, British Airways In-Flight Magazine, November 2011.
Stuart Read and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "Recipe for Success," Lessons in Entrepreneurship Series,British Airways In-Flight Magazine, June 2011.
Stuart Read and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "Everyone's Doing It," Lessons in Entrepreneurship Series,British Airways In-Flight Magazine, February 2011.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. "The Entrepreneurial Firm," in Handbook of Organisational Entrepreneurship, Daniel Hjorth (Editor), Edward Elgar Publications, 2011.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. and Nicholas Dew. "Without Judgment: An Empirically-Based Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm." Review of Austrian Economics, December 2011, 1-20.
Sarasvathy, Saras D., Nicholas Dew, Stuart Read and Robert Wiltbank. "On the Entrepreneurial Genesis of New Markets: Effectual Transformations Versus Causal Search and Selection." Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Vol. 21, No. 2, May 2011, 231-253.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. and Sankaran Venkataraman. "Entrepreneurship as Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future." Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 35, No. 1 (January 2011): p. 113-135.
Matthew LA Hayward, William R. Forster, Saras D. Sarasvathy, and Barbara L. Frederickson. "Beyond hubris: How highly confident entrepreneurs rebound for new venture formation and success,"Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 25, No. 6, November 2010, 569-578.
Saras D. Sarasvathy, Nicholas 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.
Desirée F. Pacheco, Jeffrey G. York, Thomas J. Dean, and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "The Coevolution of Institutional Entrepreneurship: A Tale of Two Theories," Journal of Management, Vol. 36, No. 4, July 2010, 974-1010.
S. D. Sarasvathy, N. Dew, and M. Ventresca. "Making waves: Unpacking entrepreneurship as collective activity," in Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence, and Growth, Jerome Katz, Thomas G. Lumpkin, and Alex Steward, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, June 2010.
S.D. Sarasvathy and H. Berglund. "On the relevance of decision making in entrepreneurial decision making," in Historical Foundations of Entrepreneurship Research, Hans Landstrom and Franz Lohrke (Editors), Edward Elgar, December 2010.
Nicholas Dew, Saras Sarasvathy, Stuart Read, and Robert. Wiltbank. "Affordable Loss: Behavioral economic aspects of the plunge decision," Strategic Entrepreneurial Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, June 2009, 105-126.
Stuart Read and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "Crisis? What crisis?," Lessons in Entrepreneurship, British Airways In-flight Magazine, March 2009.
Stuart Read and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "Dark Secrets," Lessons in Entrepreneurship Series, British Airways In-flight Magazine, July 2009.
Nicholas Dew, Stuart Read, Saras Sarasvathy, and Robert. Wiltbank. "Effectual versus predictive logics in entrepreneurial decision-making: Differences between experts and novices, Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 24, No. 4, July 2009, 287-309.
Stuart Read and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "Idea Generation," Lessons in Entrepreneurship Series, British Airways In-flight Magazine, December 2009.
S. Read, N. Dew, Saras D. Sarasvathy, and R. Wiltbank. "Marketing under uncertainty: The logic of an effectual approach," Journal of Marketing, Vol. 73, No. 3, May 2009, 1-18.
Robert Wiltbank, Stuart Read, Nicholas Dew, and Saras D. Sarasvathy. "Prediction and control under uncertainty: Outcomes in angel investing," Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 24, No. 2, March 2009, 116-133.
Susan S. Harmeling, Saras D. Sarasvathy, and R. Edward Freeman. "Related debates in ethics and entrepreneurship: Values, opportunities and contingency," Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 84, No. 3, February 2009, 341-365.
Nicholas Dew, Stuart Read, Saras D. Sarasvathy, and R. Wiltbank. "A behavioral theory of the entrepreneurial firm," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol. 66, No. 1, 2008, 37-59.
Saras D. Sarasvathy, Nicholas Dew, Stuart Read, and R. Wiltbank. "Designing organizations that design environments: Lessons from entrepreneurial expertise," Organization Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2008, 331-350.
Nicholas Dew, Stuart Read, Saras D. Sarasvathy, and R. Wiltbank. "Immortal firms in mortal markets? An entrepreneurial perspective on the Innovator's Dilemma," European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2008, 313-329.
Saras Sarasvathy and M. Augier. "Integrating evolution, cognition and design: extending Simonian perspectives to strategic organization," in Fundamentals of Business Strategy, David J. Teece and Mie Augier, Sage Publications, London, March 2008.
Saras D. Sarasvathy and Nicholas Dew. "Is Effectuation Lachmannian? A response to Chiles, Bluedorn, and Gupta (2007).," Organization Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, February 2008, 239-245.
Nicholas Dew, Stuart Read, Saras Sarasvathy, and R. Wiltbank. "Outlines of a behavioral theory of the entrepreneurial firm," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol. 66, No. 1, April 2008.
Saras D. Sarasvathy and Nicholas Dew. "Effectuation and over-trust: Debating Goel and Karri,"Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Vol. 32, No. 4, July 2008, 727-737.
Selected Books
Read, Stuart, Saras D. Sarasvathy, Nicholas Dew, Robert Wiltbank, and Anne-Valerie Ohlsson. Effectual Entrepreneurship. Oxford, UK: Rutledge, 2011.
Sarasvathy, Saras D. Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009.