Assistant Professor
Management of Organizations | Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Researcher focused on innovation, entrepreneurship and the digital economy

About

Abhishek Nagaraj is an assistant 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 in Computer Science from the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP).

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 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