Amar Bhide

Bhidé is the Thomas Schmidheiny Professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts. He recently served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Business School (HBS) during the 2020-21 academic year. At HBS he created and taught an elective course, ‘Lessons from Transformational Medical Advances,’ drawing on his research on the nature and development of practical knowledge (including medical advances).

Previously the Laurence D. Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University, Bhidé has been studying innovation and entrepreneurship for more than thirty years . He served on the faculties of HBS (from 1988 to 2000) and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. A former Senior Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company and proprietary trader at E.F. Hutton, Bhidé served on the staff of the Brady Commission which investigated the stock market crash of 1987.

Bhidé is a founding member of the Center on Capitalism and Society and spearheaded the launch of its journal, Capitalism and Society in 2005 which he edited (with Prof. Edmund Phelps) until 2017. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and serves on the board of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (an FTSE 100 company that invests in high tech companies mainly in the US and China) as an independent director.

His 2008 book, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World, (Princeton University Press) won the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Business, Finance, and Management, and was in the “Best of 2008” lists of the Economist, BusinessWeek and Barrons. Bhidé’s 2000 book, The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses (Oxford University Press) has been translated into Spanish, Chinese and Tibetan. He is also author of A Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy (Oxford 2010) and Of Politics and Economic Reality (Basic Books 1984).

His ten Harvard Business Review articles — the first published in 1982 — include “Hustle as Strategy” (1086), “Bootstrap Finance: the Art of Start-ups (1992),””How entrepreneurs craft strategies that work (1994),” and “The Judgment Deficit” (2010). His work on financial markets and governance includes “The Hidden Costs of Stock Market Liquidity” in the Journal of Financial Economics. He has written numerous articles, dating back to 1981 in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Quartz, Project Syndicate, Bloomberg Opinion, POLITICO Europe, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and The LA Times.

Bhidé earned a DBA (1988) and an MBA with high distinction as a Baker Scholar (1979) from Harvard. He received a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1977.

Research Interests

• Entrepreneurship
• Strategy
• Financial markets
• Firm governance

Education

• DBA, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States
• MBA, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States
• BTech, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India