Mot-chat #2: A master-class with Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Professor of Strategy, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

In this 30 minutes conversation, Professor Rishikesha T. Krishnan, a friend, a collaborator and a veteran in the field of technology management, synthesizes the key concepts in a lucid manner without oversimplifying it. This is the second in the series of interviews I have been doing on management of technology called MoT-chat series.

Rishi is a professor of strategy at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He has been associated with this institute since 1996. He was the director of IIM Indore from 2014 till 2018. He has won a bunch of awards. The most recent one is “Change Maestro and Institution Builder” Award from Industry Academia Conference which he won this year. He was listed as a top management thinker in India in 2013-14-15. And he has won Dewang Mehta Award for the Best Teacher in Strategic Management. He is an avid reader and clocks 50+ books a year. And I had the privilege of working with Rishi when we worked together on our book “8 steps to innovation”.

In this interview, Rishi talks about: How he got interested in the study of management of technology (1:38), key decisions involved in management of technology (3:35), his favorite frameworks in this area like S-curve and portfolio of incremental-platform-radical innovation projects (9:38), challenging areas in Management of technology (13:07), why are decisions related to radical innovations challenging (15:26), Why are Indian companies don’t have the appetite to take radical innovations steps (18:15), any sector or company in India that is doing the management of technology relatively better (20:28), message for MBA students (26:08), books he is reading (27:44).

The interview audio (MP3, 17MB) is available here and the transcript of the interview is available here.

image source: Rishi's twitter account at twitter.com