Professor Rishikesha T Krishnan’s main areas of interest are Strategy and Innovation. He has been listed in the Thinkers50 India list of most influential thinkers in management from India since 2013 and jointly received the special Thinkers50 India Innovation Award (2013).

He was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania (Fall 2008), and at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad (2011-12). He held the Jamuna Raghavan Chair in Entrepreneurship at IIMB from 2007-10.

He has written two books: 8 Steps to Innovation: Going from Jugaad to Excellence (co-authored with Vinay Dabholkar) which won the Best Book Award for 2013-14 from the Indian Society for Training & Development and From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India.

His cases co-authored with other scholars are part of the case collections of Harvard Business School, IMD Lausanne, IIM Bangalore and IIM Indore. He has published scholarly articles in journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review, Global Strategy Journal and Management International Review.

In 2017-18, he was a member of the Committee set up by the Government of India under the Chairmanship of Justice BN Srikrishna to prepare a national framework for Data Protection.

He co-founded one start-up and was the CEO of another. He has been on the jury of the Economic Times start-up awards. He is currently on the advisory board of YourNest Investment Advisors.

He has been a member of several corporate Boards and is currently on the Boards of National Payments Corporation of India, Wheels India Ltd and Higher Education Financing Agency. He is a trustee of the Foundation for Excellence India Trust.

He completed a five-year term as Director of Indian Institute of Management Indore in December 2018 and was the Mentor Director of Indian Institute of Management Sambalpur from July 2015 to March 2017.