Bharat Anand

Bharat Anand is the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, and the faculty chair of the HBX initiative. He also serves on the university''s HarvardX Faculty Committee. His research is in applied and empirical industrial organization, and examines competition in information goods markets, with a primary focus on media and entertainment. He is also an expert in multi-business strategy. He chairs several executive education programs, including the school''s executive education program on media strategies. He received an AB in Economics, magna cum laude, from Harvard University, and his PhD in Economics from Princeton University, where he was nominated to the Princeton Junior Society of Fellows.

Professor Anand''s research on media strategies has focused on two central strategic challenges that firms face in these markets. The first is the challenge of "getting noticed" amongst the increasing clutter of alternatives that are widely available to consumers. The second is the challenge that firms face in "getting paid" for what they produce, since property rights over inputs and outputs are often difficult to establish in these markets. His recent book, The Content Trap: A Strategist''s Guide to Digital Change (Random House) examines digital transformation in the media and entertainment industries, with a view to understanding what we can learn from nearly a quarter century of change there that might inform similar digital efforts elsewhere.

Professor Anand''s papers have shed light on the roles of branding and advertising as vehicles of matching and information, on competition between cable news networks, and on strategies that firms employ to tackle the challenge of weak or insecure property rights. In prior work, he studied the financing of R&D, the structure of technology licensing contracts, and the industrial organization of financial intermediation markets. His papers have been published in several leading journals in economics, marketing, and strategy.

He has authored numerous case studies in business and corporate strategy, including those on Capital One, Danaher, The Economist, International Management Group, News Corporation, Random House, and Schibsted. For several years, Anand taught the popular second-year elective course in Corporate Strategy, for which he received the Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence from the MBA class of 2006 and the MBA class of 2007. He has served as course head of the first-year Strategy course at HBS, and he currently teaches Strategy in the General Management Program.

Anand lives in Wellesley, MA with his wife, Anju, and their daughter, Rhea.