Bhaskar Chakravorti

Bhaskar Chakravorti is the Dean of Global Business at The Fletcher School at Tufts University – America’s oldest exclusively graduate school of global affairs — the founding Executive Director of Fletcher’s Institute for Business in the Global Context and founder and chair of Digital Planet, one of Fletcher’s flagship research programs that studies the impact of technology on lives and livelihoods around the world.

Bhaskar founded the Institute in 2011 with the mission of “connecting the world of business with the world,” exploring issues at the intersection of business and global context, including geopolitics, technology, security, development, the environment and the human condition. Bhaskar serves on the Fletcher faculty as Professor of the Practice of International Business and is the Chair of the IDEA Council: Imagining a Digital Economy for All. He is the Chairman of the Advisory Board to the Mastercard Policy Center for the Digital Economy, served on the Global Future Council on Innovation for the World Economic Forum and is Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Senior Advisor for Digital Inclusion at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, an Advisory Board member for the Indian Institute of Public Policy and served on the Advisory Board of the UNDP’s Center for Private Sector in Development. Bhaskar has also founded and chairs the Digital Planet initiative at The Fletcher School, that follows the evolution of 90 countries as they transition from traditional to digitally intensive economies. Most recently, as part of this initiative, he has launched a multi-year initiative, Imagining a Digital Economy for All, IDEA 2030, which is investigating the role of data, digital technologies, artificial intelligence and applications as a force for inclusive growth, development and productivity. The first year of the research is entirely devoted to the study of the world operating by digital means during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also started the first all-digital degree program at Tufts and Fletcher.

Prior to joining Fletcher, Bhaskar was a Partner of McKinsey & Company, a Distinguished Scholar at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship and on the faculty of Harvard Business School and Harvard University Center for the Environment. He was a leader of McKinsey’s Innovation and Global Forces practices, served on its Knowledge Services Committee and taught innovation and entrepreneurship at Harvard. In a 30 year career, he has been an advisor to CEOs, senior management and Boards of over 30 companies in the Fortune 500 and policymakers at national and international organizations and worked across the Americas, EU, Asia and Africa, and multiple industries. He is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, “The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World” (Harvard Business Press) and is the creator of the widely-used Digital Evolution Index. His papers and articles appear in top-tier academic journals, multiple books and in widely-read media, e.g., Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post, CNN, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Businessweek, Barron’s, The Hill, Salon, Fast Company among many others. He was a former columnist on innovation for the Washington Post and Forbes and currently has regular columns in Harvard Business Review, the Indian Express, Foreign Policy, WIRED and The Conversation; he is regularly interviewed by the press, and has appeared in a wide variety of leading media, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, National Public Radio, BBC, The Economist, MarketWatch, WIRED, CNBC, CBC, CCTV, Times of London, Al Jazeera, Economic Times, Times of India, among many others.

Bhaskar’s prior appointments were as a Partner and Thought Leader at the Monitor Group, a game theorist at Bellcore (formerly Bell Labs), assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and TAS (India’s Tata Group’s “talent pipeline for leaders”). His PhD in economics is from the University of Rochester, where he was a University Fellow. He is a graduate of the Delhi School of Economics and in economics with honors from Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College.

Research/Areas of Interest:

• Technology Innovation and its Impact on Society
• Entrepreneurship
• Innovation models for sustainability and inclusion
• Strategies for Emerging Markets
• Game Theory and Asymmetric Information
• Implementation Theory, Auctions and Mechanism Design

Education

• PhD, Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States
• MA, Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
• BA, Economics (with Honors), St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India