Faculty and Research

Mukti Khaire is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School. She teaches the required first-year MBA course, “The Entrepreneurial Manager.” She has also taught in the HBS Executive Education programs, including custom executive education offerings, the preMBA, and START. Mukti currently serves as the Faculty Co-Chair of the School's 2+2 initiative.

Mukti received her PhD in Management from Columbia Business School. Her dissertation explored how intangible resources such as legitimacy and status help new ventures grow despite their inherent financial constraints. She studied young ad agencies in New York and Chicago and examined how they overcame financial constraints and the problems associated with founder departure. In addition to quantitative analysis of longitudinal data, she interviewed several ad agency founders to understand how new ventures whose products are direct manifestations of their founders’ talents or abilities cope with expansion and founder departure.

Mukti’s research interests lie at the intersection of entrepreneurship, intangible or social firm resources, and creative industries. She explored new ventures’ heavy dependence on their founders in an earlier paper (with Heather Haveman, Columbia University) on the early magazine industry in USA. In other research, Mukti has explored the mutually reinforcing interaction between wineries’ reputations and the reputations of their chief winemakers (with Peter Roberts, Emory University), and the attitudes of founders towards venture capital-funded growth (with Rachael Elwork, Columbia University). She has recently initiated a project to study the evolution of the nascent fashion design industry in India. In this project Mukti will explore how entrepreneurs in new industries handle the double uncertainty inherent in being an entrepreneur in an industry that has still to establish itself.

Mukti's case-writing focuses on the challenges faced by founder-centric ventures, growth issues of ventures in uncertain or new markets, and entrepreneurship in creative and cultural industries.

Mukti received an award from the Eugene Lang Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School for her research on entrepreneurship in the advertising industry. Her paper, “Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: Strategies for New Venture Growth,” based on her dissertation is included in the Best Paper Proceedings of the 2005 Academy of Management Conference. Her papers have been accepted at various conferences including the American Sociological Association Conference, and the Organization Science Winter Conference. Her paper with Heather Haveman (on founder ideology) was included in “Columbia Ideas at Work” which showcases cutting-edge research at Columbia Business School which has practical applications. Mukti’s research has also recently featured in the Entrepreneurship section of HBS Working Knowledge.

Before Columbia University, Mukti got her Masters in Management from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. For her B.S and M.S. from the University of Pune she received the Sathe Memorial Award and the Joshi Memorial Award for the top-ranked graduate. She worked as an environmental management consultant before IIT and co-founded a non-profit venture for enabling grassroots level biodiversity conservation.

Mukti currently lives in Cambridge. She and her husband Samir Patil are foodies and enjoy independent films and traveling. Most recently they visited Italy.