College of Business: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rajshree Agarwal

Professor of Business Administration and
John Georges Chair of Technology Management and Strategy

Biographical Sketch

Rajshree Agarwal is the John Georges Professor of Technology Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She received a Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research interests focus on the implications of entrepreneurship and innovation for industry and firm evolution. Her recent projects examine knowledge transfer through employee entrepreneurship/mobility, experience-based advantages in new product markets, and the influence of dynamic knowledge-based capabilities on firm performance. Rajshree has published articles in journals such  as Academy of Management Journal, American Economic Review, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal and Review of Economics and Statistics. Her paper on employee entrepreneurship received the Best Paper Award for 2004 from the Academy of Management Journal, and her work on post exit knowledge diffusion received the Stephen Shrader Award at the 2005 Academy of Management Meetings. She is the editor of the SSRN Entrepreneurship and Economics Journal, and serves on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Organization. She has received research grants from the Kauffman Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Marketing Science Institute and the US Department of Agriculture.

Rajshree has taught a wide range of courses in strategic management, technology and innovation, industrial organization and microeconomics at the undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA and PhD levels. Consistent with her interests in innovation, she strives to incorporate the latest pedagogical technologies in her teaching, and has won awards for a demonstrated increase in teaching productivity. She is passionate, in particular, about providing business education to science and engineering students to enable them to be effective in industry. As part of her role of being Director of the Innovation and Technology Management Initiative, Rajshree is undertaking efforts at create specialized certificate programs and courses to help serve this need