Bio

Professor Saras D. Sarasvathy is a faculty member at the UVA Darden School of Business in the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Ethics area. In addition to MBA and doctoral courses in entrepreneurship at Darden, she teaches in doctoral programs in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Sarasvathy is the recipient of the 2022 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, the highest recognition for research in the field of entrepreneurship, awarded by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum (Entreprenörskapsforum) and the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN). In addition, she holds many other recognitions for her contributions to teaching and practice and she has been awarded professorships and honorary doctorates from universities around the world for her contributions to entrepreneurship research and education. The research program based on effectuation involves over a hundred scholars from around the world whose published and working papers can be found at www.effectuation.org. Sarasvathy has also developed several cases and other instructional materials to teach effectuation. Her co-authored textbook, Effectual Entrepreneurship won the Gold Medal in the 2012 Axiom Business Book Awards. Sarasvathy serves on the board of Lending Tree, Upekkha, a SaaS accelerator in Bangalore, India, as well as on advisory boards for academic institutions in Europe and Asia. In addition to a master's degree in industrial administration, Sarasvathy received her Ph.D. in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University. Her thesis on entrepreneurial expertise was supervised by Herbert Simon, 1978 Nobel Laureate in Economics.