Mohan Subramaniam

Mohan Subramaniam is Professor of Strategy and Digital Transformation. He focuses on the digital transformation of incumbent industrial firms and new sources of competitive advantage in the digital age. He is a recognized thought leader in digital strategy and has helped senior executives in several companies find new sources of value and growth for their companies when competing with data within emerging digital ecosystems.

He outlines his thinking in his 2022 book The Future of Competitive Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Data and Digital Ecosystems, which describes a new paradigm for competitive strategy anchored in data and digital ecosystems and the game-changing role of digital technologies in the modern economy. He says legacy firms have for decades anchored their competitive strategy in products and industry characteristics, but these approaches are now becoming outdated. The book therefore explains how legacy firms can harness their existing assets, infrastructure, and traditional strengths to leverage the new and explosive power of data by thoughtfully applying and emulating the best practices of digital titans such as Amazon and Google.

The transformational impact of digital technologies on business is comparable to what steam power, electricity, railroads, and computers has done to the industrial world over the last three centuries.

Subramaniam has worked with a wide range of companies in Europe (including Telekom Austria and Voestalpine Steel), the United States (General Motors, Avantor Corporation, Hamilton Sunstrand), and India (Dell Corporation, HP Enterprises, Honeywell, PepsiCo, Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys, HCL and Aditya Birla Group, among others).

His articles regularly appear in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He has also published articles in several leading academic journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Management, and the Journal of International Business Studies, and his research has been recognized by awards from Strategic Management Society, McKinsey Corporation, the Academy of Management, the Academy of International Business, and the Decision Sciences Institute.

Subramaniam serves as a member of the editorial advisory board of MIT Sloan Management Review, and he is an ad hoc reviewer for Strategic Management Journal, the Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Information Systems Research.

Before joining IMD in August 2022, he was an Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the Carroll School of Management in Boston College. He was previously an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut and a lecturer at Boston University. He was also a visiting faculty member at IMD between 2016 and 2018.