Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School and Director of Harvard University’s Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asia Institute. For over 25 years, he has studied entrepreneurship as a means of economic development. He currently teaches courses related to creativity in emerging economies. An online version, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, one of Harvard’s most popular, has been taken by ~600,000 students in over 200 countries. A recent book, Trust, and an earlier one, Billions of Entrepreneurs, chronicle creative ventures in China, India and beyond.​

In 2007, he was nominated to be a Young Global Leader (under 40) by the World Economic Forum. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business. In 2016, he was recognized by the Academy of Management as Eminent Scholar for Lifetime Achievement in the field of International Management. The Government of India appointed him to lead several national committees connected to entrepreneurship and higher education. In 2020, he was charged by The Lancet, the world’s leading global health journal, to co-chair a commission to re-imagine the future of India’s health system.

​Outside Harvard, he serves on the boards of the Washington-based global power company, AES Corporation, the global adtech company and India’s first unicorn, InMobi, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, PRS India, a non-profit dedicated to India’s parliamentary governance, is a cofounder of Axilor, a Bangalore-based incubator, and of several for-profit and non-profit ventures across the developing world.

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