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.
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.