Local Leaders. Global Impact.

Building & Sustaining Innovative Businesses

Join us for a stimulating discussion with a leader in entrepreneurship and strategic innovation. Dr. Raj Echambadi, Dunton Family Dean, D'Amore-McKim School of Business, at Northeastern University will lead the conversation relevant to every organization in today's competitive and evolving marketplace.

A light breakfast will be served.

Speaker Biography:

Raj Echambadi, Ph.D., Dunton Family Dean, D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University

Raj Echambadi is the Dunton Family Dean of the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. Prior to joining D’Amore-McKim, Echambadi served as the Alan J. and Joyce D. Baltz Professor and the Senior Associate Dean of Strategic Innovation in the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

With over 200 faculty members serving more than 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students, the D’Amore-McKim School of Business is known for its thought leadership across all business domains, as well as its teaching excellence. The essence of Northeastern and D’Amore-McKim is experiential learning–rigorous academic classroom content is blended with meaningful business experience through our signature global cooperative programs. It is a unique model of business education–one that inspires students and molds them into impactful business leaders. Echambadi’s charge is to collaborate with the talented D’Amore-McKim faculty and staff to execute this vision.

Echambadi’s major research interests in strategic innovation focus on how firms balance the importance of exploring opportunities found in nascent markets with exploiting opportunities in current markets. His research articles have been published in some of the top business and statistics journals. In 2004, his paper on employee entrepreneurship–describing how senior employees from incumbent companies founded new ventures that then directly competed with those incumbents themselves–won the Academy of Management Journal Best Paper Award. Utilizing principles from his work on innovation, he helped launch the online MBA program at Illinois. This program, known as the iMBA and launched in partnership with Coursera, has been hailed by the media as a breakthrough innovation in graduate education. He has also obtained several research grants, including one from the Kauffman Foundation, to study technology entrepreneurship and innovation issues.

Echambadi is also an accomplished teacher. He has taught a wide range of courses at the undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, and Ph.D. levels, and he received numerous accolades at the University of Illinois for his teaching achievements, including the Campus Excellence Award in Professional and Graduate Teaching and the College of Business Alumni Award for Teaching Excellence.

Echambadi received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Anna University in India and his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Houston. He also serves on the board of trustees of Carle Hospitals.