Associate Professor
Entrepreneurship & Innovation | Management of Organizations
Researcher focused on innovation, entrepreneurship and the digital economy
About
Abhishek Nagaraj is an associate professor in the Management and Organizations (MORS) and the Entrepreneurship and Innovation group at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He earned his PhD in Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management (TIES) group. Nagaraj also holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta and a B.Tech (opens in a new tab) in Computer Science from the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP). Read More
Professor Nagaraj’s research is in the area of innovation management and entrepreneurship. His research studies the power and limits data-driven decision-making on innovation and creativity in a variety of different contexts. His work shows how data can act as a map to guide better decisions, but could also distort where and how innovators focus their attention. His past work has studied these questions in a variety of different contexts including the role of satellite data in reshaping the mining industry, the role of Census data in driving academic innovation, and the role of digitization and intellectual property in open-source communities like Wikipedia.
Nagaraj’s work has received a number of awards including the BPS Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award, the Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) Best Dissertation Award, the J. Roberts Beyster Fellowship, as well as the Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. In addition to his teaching, Nagaraj teaches Entrepreneurial Strategy (opens in a new tab) and enjoys advising early-stage startups on go-to-market strategy and large firms in creating and guiding their data and innovation strategy.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Innovation
- Crowdsourcing
- Mapping
- Entrepreneurship
- Big Data and the Digital Economy
- Copyright and Intellectual Property
- Open Innovation
- Digitization and the Demand for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project (opens in a new tab) (with Imke Reimers)
- American Economic Journal: Policy (forthcoming)
- The Private Impact of Public Data: Landsat Satellite Maps Increased Gold Discoveries and Encouraged Entry (opens in a new tab)
- Management Science (January, 2022)
- Information Seeding and Knowledge Production in Online Communities: Evidence from OpenStreetMap (opens in a new tab)
- Management Science (August, 2021)
- Social Learning in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Community Establishments’ Closure Decisions Follow Those of Nearby Chain Establishments (opens in a new tab) (with Mathijs de Vaan, Saqib Mumtaz and Sameer Srivastava)
- Management Science (July, 2021)
- Improving data access democratizes and diversifies science (opens in a new tab) (with Esther Shears and Mathijs de Vaan)
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (September, 2020)
- The Economics of Maps (opens in a new tab) (with Scott Stern)
- Journal of Economic Perspectives (February, 2020)
- Does Copyright Affect Reuse? Evidence from Google Books and Wikipedia (opens in a new tab)
- Management Science (July, 2018)
- How Competition Affects Contributions to Open Source Platforms: Evidence from OpenStreetMap and Google Maps (opens in a new tab) (with Henning Piezunka)
- (Revise-and-resubmit, Strategy Science)
- Cutting Through the (Digital) Clutter: Technological Change and Careers of Men and Women in Cultural Markets (opens in a new tab) (with Aruna Ranganathan)
- (Revise-and-resubmit, Administrative Science Quarterly)
- Getting on the Map: The Impact of Online Listings on Business Performance (opens in a new tab) (with Michael Luca and Gauri Subramani)
- (Revise-and-resubmit, Management Science)
- How Does Data Access Shape Science? Evidence from the Impact of U.S. Census’s Research Data Centers on Economics Research (opens in a new tab) (with Matteo Tranchero)
- The Streetlight Effect in Data-Driven Exploration (opens in a new tab) (with Johannes Hoelzemann , Gustavo Manso and Matteo Tranchero)
- Socioeconomic Network Heterogeneity and Pandemic Policy Response (opens in a new tab) (with Mohammad Akbarpour, Cody Cook, Aude Marzuoli, Simon Mongey, Matteo Saccarola, Pietro Tebaldi, Shoshana Vasserman, and Hanbin Yang)
- NBER WP #27374
At Haas since 2017
2024 – present, Associate Professor, Haas School of Business
2017 – 2024, Assistant Professor, Haas School of Business
2016 – 2017, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digitization, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
- English
- French
- Hindi
- Kannada
- Marathi
Wiley Blackwell Outstanding Dissertation Award
Behavioral and Policy Sciences (BPS), July 2017
Technology and Innovation Management (TIM Division) Outstanding Dissertation Award
July 2017
Kauffman Prize
Best Student Paper, REER 2015
Ewing Marion Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship
2014
J. Roberts Beyster Fellowship
2014
NESTA Innovation Research Grant
2014
Sloan Foundation Research Grant
2014
MIT Energy Fellowship
2012
- Haas School of Business study analyzes impact of chains businesses on local business closures (opens in a new tab), The Daily Californian, 09/07/2021
- UC Berkeley Haas School of Business launches online program for MBA students (opens in a new tab), The Daily Californian, 08/03/2021
- Mapping the Good and the Bad of Pandemic-Related Restrictions (opens in a new tab), Stanford Business Insights, 09/01/2020
- This interactive tool lets you experiment with different COVID-19 reopening strategies (opens in a new tab), Fast Company, 08/28/2020
- Most internet service providers are gone. Sonic has survived — and thrived (opens in a new tab), San Francisco Chronicle, 07/26/2019
- Like Uber, but for cartographers (opens in a new tab), CityLab, 09/19/2018
- MapLab: How satellites cracked open a gold mine (opens in a new tab), CityLab, 08/29/2018
- MapLab: Satellites on fire (opens in a new tab), CityLab, 08/15/2018
- The founder of a beloved productivity app thinks the startup model is broken — here’s how he’s trying to keep the tech industry from ‘making the same 10,000 mistakes over and over again’ (opens in a new tab), Business Insider Prime (reg. req’d), 08/12/2018
- The electric scooter acid test (opens in a new tab), Moneywatch, 07/16/2018
- Google knowns what we do online and may soon know everything else about us, too (opens in a new tab), KQED California Report, 05/16/2018
- Here’s how Facebook can regain trust at its F8 conference (opens in a new tab), Fast Company, 04/27/2018
- Mark Zuckerberg grilled for two days: What’s next for Facebook? (opens in a new tab), The Mercury News, 04/11/2018
- Tech backlash: ‘Maybe Silicon Valley needs to be taken down to size’ (opens in a new tab), The Mercury News, 03/19/2018
- Nearly 200 New Profs At Top B-Schools (opens in a new tab), Poets & Quants, 10/03/2017
- Entrepreneurial Strategy, MBA 295