Amar Bhidé Keynote Speaker

Amar Bhidé has spent four decades exploring how imagination, judgment and entrepreneurship drive progress. Since 1985 he has blended rigorous scholarship with practical know-how, making complex theory accessible to innovators, investors and policymakers. His research spans innovation, finance and health policy, and his guidance has shaped boardrooms and classrooms on five continents.

At Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health he designs and teaches a pioneering course on transformative innovations that reaches far beyond medicine. He previously held the Thomas Schmidheiny Professorship of International Business at Tufts University (2010–2023) and served as the Lawrence Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia Business School (2000–2009), following faculty appointments at Harvard and Chicago. Visiting stints at Harvard Business School (2020–2021) kept him engaged with the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders.

Bhidé’s latest book, Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known (Oxford, 2025), was selected by the Financial Times as a Summer Books pick, capping a celebrated catalogue that includes A Call for Judgment, The Venturesome Economy and the classic The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses. His commentary—ten Harvard Business Review cover stories among scores of articles—reaches readers of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Project Syndicate and Barron’s, while regular appearances on Bloomberg TV and CNBC extend his insights to global audiences.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a director of an FTSE 100 company, Bhidé links macro-analysis to board-level responsibility. Earlier roles at McKinsey & Company, E.F. Hutton and the Brady Commission’s investigation of the 1987 market crash inform his pragmatic perspective on risk and resilience. He holds a DBA and MBA from Harvard Business School, where he graduated Baker Scholar, and a B.Tech from IIT Bombay, honoured as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2013.