Bhaskar Chakravorti

Senior Lecturer of Business Administration

Unit	Entrepreneurial Management
Contact	Work (617) 495-0625 Send E-Mail
Interests	corporate venturing, entrepreneurship, game theory, innovation, networks, more >

Overview

Biography

Publications & Course Materials

Current Research

Areas of Interest

Bhaskar Chakravorti joined the HBS faculty in July 2008 and is a faculty associate with the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE). He is also a Partner of McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting firm, where he is a leader of the Firm's Innovation practice and has served on its Knowledge Services Committee, which oversees McKinsey's 1,200 person global research system. At HBS, he teaches and writes on entrepreneurship management, new venture formation and innovation; specifically, in the MBA program he teaches: "Entrepreneurship and Innovation Shaped by Crises" and "Building Business in the Conext of Life". Bhaskar has advised CEOs, Boards and senior management of the global leaders in multiple industries (technology, health and consumer care and renewable energy) on innovation, growth and new business-building. In 15 years of consulting he has advised over 30 companies in the Fortune 500. He has helped start new businesses that have scaled up in established companies, re-positioned private equity portfolio companies for growth and has been involved in the public policy arena with regulators and on Capitol Hill. His clients and scope of work cover many geographies in addition to the U.S. and the EU: e.g., Brazil, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Philippines, Canada, multiple African countries. Bhaskar's book, The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World, Harvard Business School Press; 2003, and over 35 articles are on the topics of innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy, decision-making and mechanism/organization design through applications of game theory.

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Featured Work

The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World (HBS Press; Boston 2003)
Book

FOR EXECUTIVES, strategists, and students of technology-driven industries, this is a powerful playbook for the high-stakes innovation game. The market is full of fluctuating, and seemingly illogical, fortunes: A long shot like eBay catches fire, while a revolutionary concept like WebMD fails. Yet, says Bhaskar Chakravorti, perhaps these outcomes should be expected. Innovations succeed only when individuals adopt them. Paradoxically, in highly interconnected markets, this happens slowly: Adoption by one depends on adoption by others. To help strategists leverage this paradox, Chakravorti provides a new framework for interconnected choice built on concepts from game theory and carried out using hands-on, go-to-market strategies.

How to Innovate in a Downturn, Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2009
Op-ed Article

The New Rules for Bringing Innovations to Market, Harvard Business Review, March 2004
Article

It's tough to get consumers to adopt innovations--and it's getting tougher all the time. That's because more and more markets are taking on the characteristics of networks. The interconnections among today's companies are so plentiful that often a new product's adoption by one player depends on its systematic adoption by other players. The traditional levers executives use to launch products--such as targeting unique customer segments or developing compelling value propositions--don't work as well in this new environment. Instead, innovators must orchestrate a change of behaviors across the market, so that a large number of players adopts their offerings and believes they are better off for having done so. In this article, Bhaskar Chakravorti outlines a four-part framework for doing just that: Reason back from a target endgame, implementing only those strategies that maximize the chances of getting to goal; complement power players, positioning the innovation as an enhancement to products or services; offer coordinated switching incentives to three core groups: the players that add to the innovation's benefits, the players that act as channels to adopters, and the adopters themselves; and preserve flexibility in case the initial strategy fails.

Learning Objective:

To appreciate that new products may need to be marketed not only to target end users, but to other players with whom the intended user interacts.

Subjects Covered:

Behavior, Innovation, Market positioning, Networks, Product introduction, Product positioning, Software.

Innovation Without Borders; Innovations, Summer 2007
Article

The willingness to connect with an external network is key in an environment where products and services are themselves increasingly inter-connected. We see trends in this direction for a variety of reasons, either because uses of multiple products are complementary or because information and marketing networks have become so prevalent and play a key role in decision-making and adoption. The greater the inter-connectedness, the greater the need to collaborate with the network into which the innovation must connect. In light of these trends and the clear benefit of innovating "without borders," it becomes critical for an innovator to establish some rules of engaging with a network: whether to and how to play. In this article, I shall offer a framework for evaluating three stages ofthe decision to engage with the network from the perspective of a prime innovator, who instigates the change and bears central responsibility for bringing the innovation to market. The approach is organized around three questions:

Question 1: Should I open the borders and collaborate with an external network?
Question 2: What are the potential sources ofresistance in the network to innovation and what motivators and barriers determine the actions that the network takes?
Question 3: What are my options for overcoming the challenges and engaging with the network to realize value by innovating without borders?

Inventing the Future of Management
Video interview

Bhaskar Chakravorti speaks on a "design flaw" in large organizations and the need to renew a business by selectively "burning down" elements of the model to enable islands of entrepreneurial activity that will regenerate its ability to innovate and its value proposition.

Faculty and Research