Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan (VG) is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. VG is the Coxe Distinguished Professor (a Dartmouth-wide faculty chair) at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. VG is a Faculty Partner at Mach49, a Silicon Valley incubator. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. He worked with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt to write, “How GE is Disrupting Itself”, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that pioneered the concept of reverse innovation – any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. HBR picked reverse innovation as one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century. VG is a NYT and WSJ Best Selling author and a two-time winner of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best article published in HBR. VG was named by Thinkers 50 as a Top 3 Management Thinker in the world and received the Breakthrough Innovation Award in 2011. VG was inducted into Thinkers 50 Management Thinkers Hall of Fame and was given the Distinguished Achievement Award for most contributions to the understanding of innovation in 2019. VG has been a select few who have received Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two different categories.

Govindarajan has been identified as a leading management thinker by influential publications including: Outstanding Faculty, named by Business Week in its Guide to Best B-Schools; Top Ten Business School Professor in Corporate Executive Education, named by Business Week; Top Five Most Respected Executive Coach on Strategy, rated by Forbes; Rising Super Star, cited by The Economist; Outstanding Teacher of the Year, voted by MBA students.

Prior to joining the faculty at Tuck, VG was on the faculties of Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau) and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India).

The recipient of numerous awards for excellence in research, Govindarajan was inducted into the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame, and ranked by Management International Review as one of the Top 20 North American Superstars for research in strategy. One of his papers was recognized as one of the ten most-often cited articles in the entire 50-year history of Academy of Management Journal.

VG is a rare faculty who has published more than twenty articles in the top academic journals (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal) and more than twenty articles in prestigious practitioner journals including several best-selling HBR articles. He published the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best Seller, Reverse Innovation. His HBR articles “Engineering Reverse Innovations” and “Stop the Innovation Wars” won McKinsey Awards. His HBR articles “How GE Is Disrupting Itself” and “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention” are HBR all time Top 50 Best Sellers.

VG has worked with CEOs and top management teams in more than 40% of the Fortune 500 firms to discuss, challenge, and escalate their thinking about strategy. His clients include: Boeing, Coca- Cola, Colgate, Deere, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, J&J, New York Times, P&G, Sony, and Wal-Mart. He has been a keynote speaker in the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, TED, and World Economic Forum at Davos.

VG received his doctorate from the Harvard Business School and was awarded the Robert Bowne Prize for the best thesis proposal. He received his MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School. VG received his Chartered Accountancy degree in India where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal for obtaining the first rank nationwide.