Leading authority on the role innovation and entrepreneurship play in creating prosperity in a globalized world.

Highlights

Amar Bhidé (pronounced BEE-day) is a leading authority on innovation, entrepreneurship and business strategy. He is the author of two books on the business and leadership challenges of starting and growing new businesses around new ideas.

The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World.

Unique and counterintuitive in its perspective, The Venturesome Economy focuses our attention, not on scientists and engineers as innovators, but on venturesome consumers and the entrepreneurs and marketers who serve their appetite for the new—the real key to prosperity in a global economy.

The Economist named The Venturesome Economy one of the best books of 2008.

The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses

A deeply researched landmark study that offers invaluable help to entrepreneurs who want to start a new business or executives who want to grow a new enterprise within the business they already have.

His next book (due Oct. 2010), A Call to Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy, explains in a clear way how bad theories and miss-regulation have caused this dangerous divergence between the real economy and finance. Amar Bhidé resists the impulse for drastic change, instead offering a blueprint for correcting the historic misalignment between the numbers-driven financial sector and the innovation-driven "real economy."

Amar Bhidé is Thomas Schmidheiny Professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a visiting scholar, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Previously he was the Lawrence D. Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University. He is a member of the Center on Capitalism and Society and founder and editor of its journal, Capitalism and Society.

Professor Bhidé is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has served on the faculty of Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. He served on the staff of the Brady Commission, which investigated the 1987 stock market crash.

He is a former Senior Engagement Manager, McKinsey & Co. and VP, E.F. Hutton. He is widely published in both academic and mainstream business media.

The Venturesome Economy

InThe Venturesome Economy, acclaimed business and economics scholar Amar Bhidé shows why the venturesome consumer is the real key to Western prosperity.

When breakthrough ideas know no borders, a nation’s capacity to exploit cutting-edge research regardless of where it originates is crucial: our venturesome consumption—the willingness and ability of our businesses and consumers to effectively use products and technologies derived from scientific research—is far more important than our share of such research. In fact, a venturesome economy benefits from an increase in research produced abroad: the success of Apple’s iPod, for instance, owes much to technologies developed in Asia and Europe. As long as the venturesome spirit remains alive and well we need not fear advances abroad.

The Venturesome Economy was named to The Pick of the Pile: Best Books of 2008 by The Economist.

Credentials

• Thomas Schmidheiny Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
• Visiting Scholar, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
• Former Lawrence D. Glaubinger Professor of Business, Columbia University
• Member, Center on Capitalism and Society and founder of the journal, Capitalism and Society
• Member, Council on Foreign Relations
• Fellow Royal Society of Arts
• Former faculty, Harvard Business School and University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
• Former Senior Engagement Manager, McKinsey & Co. and VP, E.F. Hutton
• DBA and MBA with high distinction as a Baker Scholar, Harvard University
• B.Tech, Indian Institute of Technology

Books

A Call to Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy (Oxford University Press, October 2010)

The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton University Press, 2008)

The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Of Politics and Economic Reality (Basic Books, 1984)