The award-winning academic blogger highlighting businesses’ role in addressing global challenges

Sreevas Sahasranamam is on a mission. A big one. Born in Kerala, southern India, Sreevas is now professor of international business and entrepreneurship at Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. His academic research focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship and sustainability, particularly businesses’ role in alleviating poverty around the world and how to bridge inequality around emerging technology. 

Sreevas has written papers on developing social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship ecosystems in rural areas, creating innovation ecosystems to tackle grand challenges (such as low-cost heart valves in India) and the role of digital public infrastructure in entrepreneurship development. Serious stuff and heavyweight issues. 

But one major outlet for his work in this area, and something that has played an important role in his career to date, has been his blogs, which was shortlisted for this year’s overall Management Publication of the Year and won the Sustainable Futures category.

In the rarefied air of academia, though, Sreevas admits that his approach with the blog wasn’t always warmly received. 

• Read more: Management Publication of the Year

“Around 2015, 2016, there was a bit of a critique,” Sreevas says, choosing his words carefully. “Not to my face, but I heard via third parties basically saying that by doing a lot of blog posts I was possibly coming across as not a very serious academic. The implication being that maybe I should stick to focusing on serious academic papers. That sort of thing.” 

“It blew up!”

It gave Sreevas pause for thought, but he reflected that while academic research and papers were his bread and butter, it was just as vital for him to get the information out there in a format that would engage as wide a range of people as possible. So he went back to blogging. Today, recent posts include ‘4 emerging trends from India's booming entrepreneur ecosystem’ and ‘Surely beggars can be entrepreneurs’. His blog is a mix of articles, videos and brief abstracts about his work. 

Sreevas says that, over the years, individual blog posts have had a disproportionate impact, some reaching huge numbers of people, and others opening up avenues of new work and even leading to career opportunities. 

“I wrote a blog in February 2023 talking about AI and the future of humanity,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It blew up! It had more readers than all my research articles put together! Suddenly, out of the blue, I was seen as a global expert on AI and the Hindu faith. The truth is I’m not an expert on either, I just know bits of both.”