Building Ventures: Expert Startup Strategies

Professor Saras D. Sarasvathy is a prominent faculty member at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, specializing in strategy, entrepreneurship, and ethics. She teaches MBA and doctoral courses at Darden and has also lectured in doctoral programs across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Recognized for her significant contributions to entrepreneurship research, she received the prestigious 2022 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research from the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum and the Research Institute of Industrial Economics. Sarasvathy's research program on effectuation involves over a hundred scholars globally, with resources available at www.effectuation.org. She has authored several instructional materials and co-wrote the award-winning textbook Effectual Entrepreneurship, which received the Gold Medal in the 2012 Axiom Business Book Awards. Her academic credentials include a master's degree in industrial administration and a Ph.D. in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University, where her thesis was supervised by Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon. In addition to her teaching and research roles, she serves on the boards of Lending Tree and Upekkha, a SaaS accelerator in India, and holds advisory positions at various academic institutions worldwide.