Biography

Vijay Govindarajan (‘VG’) is a distinguished academic, author, consultant, and speaker, and one of the world’s foremost experts on strategy and innovation.

VG is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck School of Business, a Dartmouth-wide chair and the highest distinction awarded to Dartmouth faculty. He is a former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, a Faculty Partner in the Silicon Valley incubator Mach49, and a Senior Advisor at the strategy consulting firm Acropolis Advisors.

The author of 15 influential books, VG has worked with the CEOs and top management teams at more than 40% of the Fortune 500 companies, including Coca-Cola, Deere, J.P. Morgan Chase, Microsoft, P&G, and Wal-Mart. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric and has delivered keynote addresses at many leading conferences, including the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, and the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Poets & Quants has named VG the World’s Best B-School Professor, Business Week listed him as a Top Ten B-School professor, Forbes ranked him among the Top Five most respected executive coaches on strategy, The Economist hailed him as a Rising Super Star, and Thinkers 50 named him a Top 3 Management Thinker in the world and honored him with Breakthrough Idea Award and Innovation Award. 

VG is the creator of three groundbreaking business concepts: Three Box Solution, Reverse Innovation, and Fusion Strategy.  He is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author and a two-time winner of the annual McKinsey Award, which recognizes the best article published in Harvard Business Review. Two of his articles, “How GE Is Disrupting Itself” and “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention,” are all-time HBR Top 50 bestsellers.

The recipient of numerous awards for excellence in research, he has been inducted into the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame, elected Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, and ranked by Management International Review as one of the Top 20 North American Superstars for strategy research. He is one of the few academics who has published more than 25 articles in the top academic journals and over 25 articles in leading practitioner journals.

Before he joined Tuck, VG served on the faculty of Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad). He received his MBA with distinction and his doctorate from Harvard Business School, where he was awarded the Robert Bowne Prize for the best thesis proposal.  He earned his Chartered Accountancy degree in India, where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal for securing the first rank nationally.

You can follow VG on LinkedIn for insights on strategy and innovation.