Tarun Khanna

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, and the inaugural director of Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, fostering interdisciplinary research on South Asia. He has taught at HBS & Harvard College since 1993, focusing on how entrepreneurship drives social and economic development. His various books range from Billions of Entrepreneurs, a first-person 2008 comparison of Chinese and Indian entrepreneurial ecosystems, to a 2022 co-edited collection of essays, Making Meritocracy, all chronicling the creativity exercised by entrepreneurs for societal development. His online course, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, has been taken by nearly a million students worldwide. He serves on the boards of numerous for-profit and not-for-profit companies in the US and India.  Most recently, he is a cofounder of Bangalore’s tech incubator, Axilor Ventures, of India’s largest chain of robot-fueled chai (tea) cafes, and of the US 501c3 corporation, Aspire Institute, providing free higher education services to millions of first-generation college students in ~200 countries.