Professor Narayanan Awarded Fulbright Scholarship

LeBow’s Associate Dean for Research, VK Narayanan, PhD, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to fund a research sabbatical in India, where he will broaden his research on innovation to include emerging economies.

Narayanan will split his time in India between Ahmedabad and Bangalore, collaborating with faculty members in Indian Institutes of Management in both cities. He plans to develop a comparative analysis of incubators and science/technology parks – property-based organizations with identifiable administrative centers designed to foster entrepreneurship.

Some of the questions his research will attempt to answer include: How are these incubators and science/technology parks financed and organized? What activities do they perform? How do they protect intellectual property? What do they contribute to entrepreneurship and to regional economic development?

“These are questions not merely relevant to economic policy; they are central to scholarship in the field of management of innovation,” Narayanan says. “Empirical research on incubators and science/technology parks is in its infancy. And it’s important, because moving innovations from conception to the commercialization stage has been recognized as a key engine of economic growth in both emerging economies and developed ones.”

He has obtained two grants from Fulbright previously. In 1997, he received the Fulbright-FLAD Cahir in Management of Technology to research university internship programs at the University of Aveiro in Portugal. In 2004, while at Drexel, he obtained the Fulbright Alumni grant to work with his colleague in Portugal, delivering a knowledge management course in a global classroom format.

Narayanan is planning a sabbatical for this project from January through June 2016.