Biography

Sankaran Venkataraman (“Venkat”) is the MasterCard Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia. He is a member of the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Ethics area at Darden and teaches MBA and executive level courses in strategy, entrepreneurship, and ethics.  He is an internationally renowned scholar and educator in the field of entrepreneurship.  He has published extensively and has lectured around the world. He has earned the “Outstanding Faculty Award” at Darden and was voted the “Most Popular Professor” at Business Week Online based on a poll of Darden students. The Academy of Management, the largest professional body of management educators in the world, has recognized his research by awarding him the inaugural IDEA award for Foundational Research in entrepreneurship and in 2010, the Academy of Management Review, a leading journal of the academy, cited one of his papers as the most influential in the past decade from among the papers published in that journal.  

As a corporate planning executive in a major Indian firm, he was a part of a founding team that created and developed a highly successful new business venture. He consults with Fortune 500 firms as well as several small companies. He facilitates strategy discussion for firms and is advisor to firms, universities and government organizations. He has been a speaker for and advisor to the Entrepreneurial Forum, a program of the International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce aimed at promoting trade through entrepreneurship around the world.  He is a faculty in numerous executive education programs at Darden and the Indian School of Business, and is on the faculty team of The Executive Program. 

Venkat was the first holder of the Bruggeman Distinguished Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and, from 1989 to 1995, he was Paul Yeakel Term Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School. He received his MA in Economics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India; his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (Calcutta); and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.