Vish Krishnan

Vish Krishnan holds the Jacobs Chair in Engineering and Management at the University of California, San Diego Rady School of Management, where he also serves as faculty director of the Rady Entrepreneurship Initiative, CIID. Krishnan is a faculty affiliate at the Harvard Business School Laboratory for Innovation Science. After earning a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Krishnan served as a professor and IC2 senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Rady School as one of its founding faculty members. His academic background includes degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT.

Krishnan's research and teaching focus on innovation, entrepreneurship, and product management, with an emphasis on science and technology-driven innovation, sustainable growth, new product design and development, project and operations management, and IT-enabled productivity improvements. He has co-authored widely cited articles on innovation and product development and management. His work on solutions-driven growth has appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review and has been applied in multinational companies. Krishnan has served in editorial roles at Management Science, M&SOM, POMS, IEEE-EM, and other journals, and has received the distinguished fellow award from the POMS College of Innovation & Technology Management.

Krishnan has consulted with senior leadership at companies such as Nissan, Zeiss, Amylin Pharma, Motorola, and Sony on organizational, cultural, and digital transformation. His work with Dell Computer has been documented as a Harvard Business School case study and taught at several universities. His collaboration with 3M was featured on the front page of Wall Street Journal. Krishnan is a co-founder, angel investor, and advisor to several science and technology companies, including Acceva, Inc., which provides software and services to global clients in Germany, Asia, and North America.

At the Rady School, Krishnan leads the core course series "Lab to Market," offering students practical experience in entrepreneurship. He also serves as associate director for the Institute for the Global Entrepreneur, a joint venture between the Rady School and the Jacobs School of Engineering, where he holds a joint appointment. Krishnan's research addresses the effectiveness and efficiency of R&D, operations, and ventures, and he collaborates with the School of Medicine through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the State of California. He contributed to a University of California team that secured a National Institutes of Health grant to promote life-science entrepreneurship through the Center for Accelerated Innovation.

Krishnan is a five-time recipient of the Most Valuable Professor award at the University of California. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard Business School and has delivered seminars at universities including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, the University of Chicago, and UCLA. Krishnan teaches executive programs on technological innovation and growth, project management, and product marketing and management, combining academic insight with industry experience in business, technology, and entrepreneurship.