India Centre people and partners

Jaideep is a Professor at CJBS and a Fellow of Clare College. His qualifications include a BTech (IIT Delhi) and a PhD (University of Southern California). Jaideep is also a renowned author, having co-authored the award-winning book, Frugal Innovation, which explores how entrepreneurs in India are thriving despite limited resources. His research primarily centres around international business, marketing, strategy, and innovation, with interests in radical innovation in high-tech industries, the impact of firm culture on innovation, and R&D location decisions. Jaideep’s work has been featured in prestigious media outlets, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, and MIT Sloan Management Review. His most recent book, How Should A Government Be? The New Levers of State Power, was published in 2021.

Venkata (“Serish”) is a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, and leads InnoFrugal, a decade-old non-profit focused on frugal innovation and impact investing. He’s spearheading a white paper on climate finance in India and is a multidisciplinary expert in academia and entrepreneurship.

Serish specialises in leveraging AI for impact, open innovation, and circular economy for frugal innovations. He’s authored key reports and participated in the EU-funded FRANCIS project. He co-hosts the More With Less Podcast on sustainable growth.

In addition to his role at Cambridge Judge, Serish serves on multiple advisory boards. He served as an advisor to the Smart Village Movement (SVM), a research project of Berkeley Haas Garwood Center. He previously co-founded Vault Impact, raising €17.5 million for an impact VC fund. He has developed a MOOC (massive open online course) on frugal innovation and is also a guest lecturer at global universities.

Sam holds an MA in Geography from Cambridge and is a UK Chartered Accountant and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School.

After qualifying with Price Waterhouse, his career has been focused on the remarkable growth and development of India’s financial markets since the path-breaking economic reforms of the early 1990s.
This included senior roles in research, equity sales, wealth management and corporate broking at Robert/Jardine Fleming, JP Morgan, Cazenove, UBS, Standard Chartered, and Credit Suisse. His clients have included many leading global institutional investors and he has been based both in London and in Mumbai.

More recently he has moved on to a role in Indian Asset Management as Director and Head of UK Business Development at Quantum Advisors. Quantum is one of India’s longest-established India Equity Managers, with a track record since 2000 with differentiated value and ESG investment strategies.

Sam is also a Governor of the Fund for Women Graduates Charity and a Trustee of Pratham UK. Pratham is one of India’s leading educational NGOs.

His interests include how to address the challenges presented by achieving equitable growth for large emerging economies while facing the growing threats from climate change, environmental degradation and social dislocation.

Marvin is a Fellow at CJBS, a Senior Scholar at the London School of Economics, a Sloan Fellow at London Business School, and a qualified Chartered Accountant. His primary area of research interest is government innovation and permanent funds in the context of intergenerational equity. His experience combines an uncommon mix of cross-disciplinary skills with deep expertise in entrepreneurship, finance, brand and innovation. He designed Goa/India’s first model permanent fund to mitigate resource curse and safeguard intergenerational equity (2015) and is the creator of India’s first licenced animation character, Chhota Birbal (2002), designed to preserve local identity.

Carlos leads initiatives to scale market-based innovations through impact investment and provide practical support to increase capacity and integrity in governments. He has worked for international institutions, governments, and corporations such as the World Bank, European Commission, Cisco, and Accenture. In addition, he spent 8 years in a social innovation lab for health-related behavioural change in East London. Carlos has also held roles as an Associate of the UK Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and Director of Evaluations of EU Programs worldwide.

He led a €10bn evaluation for the European Council of Ministers and worked as an economist at the World Bank and Central Bank of Peru. Carlos holds postgraduate degrees in Economics from Yale and Columbia Universities.

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