Rajesh Chandy
Academic Director of the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development, Professor of Marketing at London Business School, Tony and Maureen Wheeler Chair in Entrepreneurship
bio
Rajesh Chandy’s current research lies at the intersection of business and development. His recent projects have covered the impact of business skills among micro-entrepreneurs in South Africa, novel financing approaches in Ghana, property rights in slums in Egypt, innovation among farmers in India, highways and private education expenditures in India, and using big data for development outcomes.
Chandy is a member of the advisory board of the Journal of Marketing and a Co-Editor of the journal’s special issue on “Better Marketing for a Better World”. He is also co-editor of the Management Science special issue on “Business and Climate Change,” and previously served as an Area Editor for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation area at Management Science. Chandy’s research and publications have received several awards, including the Mahajan Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Strategy Research, the ISMS Gary Lilien Practice Prize for research that contributes most to the practice of marketing, the Journal of Marketing Harold Maynard Award for contributions to marketing theory and thought, the AMA TechSIG Award for the best article on Technology and Innovation (twice), the Gerald E. Hills Award for the Best Paper on Entrepreneurial Marketing, and the Albert Page Award for best professional paper on innovation. He has also received the AMA Early Career Award for contributions to marketing strategy research, and has been named an MSI Young Scholar. Fortune magazine described Chandy’s findings on innovation as “an unorthodox and bracing set of management principles.”
During 2006-2008, Chandy served as a member of the US Secretary of Commerce Advisory Committee on Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy. He has provided advisory and executive education services to Carrefour, Novo Nordisk, Nordea, Rabobank, Toshiba, St. Jude Medical, 3M, Philips, Commonwealth Microfinance Limited, American Medical Systems, Deutsche Telekom, Bertelsmann, Hutchinson Technology, Microsoft, Mundipharma, Rexam, Wrigley, GfK, Futuredontics, Telenor, Vodafone, World Economic Forum, and the US and UK governments, among others. He serves as an Independent Director on the board of Laurus Labs Limited, a publicly listed pharmaceutical company.
Chandy received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Southern California. In 2018, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Publications
When Bulldozers Loom: Informal Property Rights and Marketing Practice Innovation Among Emerging Market Microentrepreneurs
Abstract
Microentrepreneurs represent the most common type of business in the world, and marketing is a primary means by which they earn their livelihoods. They are especially numerous in emerging markets, and many live precarious lives characterized by poverty and potentially devastating exogenous shocks. This paper examines the marketing practices of microentrepreneurs by studying grocery retailers in a large slum in Cairo, Egypt. Employing detailed data on the marketing practices of these retailers, the paper examines why some microentrepreneurs engage in innovation in their marketing practices (and perform better), whereas others fail to do so. We highlight the causal effect of an important, but rarely studied, factor—informal property rights—on innovation in marketing practices among microentrepreneurs. Because few microentrepreneurs in the context we study have access to formal property rights, the threat of expropriation looms large in their lives. We show that those microentrepreneurs who possess their stores (without actually owning them) are substantially less likely to innovate in their marketing practices than those who lease their stores. We make use of an exogenous shock to property-rights laws to assess the causal impact of informal property rights on innovation in marketing practices.
