Rajendra K. Srivastava
Jack R. Crosby Regents Chair in Business Administration
McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX

Raj Srivastava is the Jack R. Crosby Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Marketing and Management Science and Information Systems at the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin. He is also Research Fellow at the e-Business Research Center at Penn State University, the Daniel J. Jordan research Fellow at Goizueta Business School, Emory University and Charles A. LeMaistre Centennial Fellow at IC2 Institute at UT Austin.  He holds a B. Tech. (Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. His MBA and Ph.D. (Business Administration) degrees are from the University of Pittsburgh.

His research, spanning marketing and finance/economics, has been published in Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and Journal of Banking and Finance. He has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals. He was a guest editor for the Journal of Marketing Research's Special Issue on Brand Management and Equity. He received the 1985 Alpha Kappa Psi Award from the American Marketing Association for the article in the Journal of Marketing judged to contribute most to the practice of marketing. In 1993 he received the highest recognition for research at The University of Texas—the CBA Foundation Award for Outstanding Research Contributions. In 1999 his article on Market-Based Assets in the Journal of Marketing received both the Maynard Award for the article judged to contribute most to the development of theory in marketing and the MSI/Paul Root Award for the article judged to contribute most to the practice of marketing, the only paper to have won both awards simultaneously. He is also a recipient of Marketing Science Institute's Research Awards on Brand Equity and on Assessment of the Value of Information Technology.

He is committed to cross-functional integration in management of business processes. His current research and teaching interests include driving growth and shareholder value via processes that create value for customers and by leveraging market-based assets (value networks). He is examining the impact of e-Business on corporate financial performance. He has been instrumental (under the sponsorship of Andersen Consulting (Accenture) and 3M) in the development of the Center for Customer Insights for global, collaborative, cross-functional research and academic programs that are focused on e-Marketing and the Internet. He serves on advisory boards of several startups. He is developing an e-Business certificate program at the Goizueta Business School and at the McCombs School of Business.

Raj has been invited to speak in conferences and workshops in North and Latin America, Europe, Australia and Asia. He has consulted and delivered executive education programs for such firms as 3M, Aon, AMD, AT&T, American Airlines, Bloomberg L.P., Conference Board (Canada and USA), Dell Computers, Dow Chemicals, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Imation, Intelliquest, Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett, Link Resources (IDG), Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Nutrasweet Company, PPG Industries, Shell Chemicals, Texas Instruments, and Xerox Corporation.

Views on Business Education in the New Economy

The new economy has major implications for both the process and content of business education:

•	From a process point, most well known institutions have a “business model” that is high margins and low turns. They build their reputation on the quality of their outputs (graduating students and research). Under the new economy, available technologies foster a low margin and high turnover business model (e.g., University of Pheonix) that is rejected by most schools and which has not been successfully implemented by emerging private companies. New technologies also enable greater flexibility (an executive student might participate in a class through teleconferencing, online chats and file exchanges while on the road), collaboration between geographically dispersed universities and the ability to make educational materials available instantly without a lengthy publishing process. It also promises individual faculty an opportunity to develop their own brand equity separately from that of the university.

•	From a content viewpoint, implications of issues like network externalities, collaborative virtual networks, premiums on corporate agility due to rapid technological changes have yet to penetrate all functional areas. Further, since the new economy is characterized by networked value creation and speed where parallel processing works better than sequential decisions, virtual cross-functional teams are likely to be critical. Today, most business education tends to be functional. And, incentives (merit review, promotions and tenure) are lined up to foster narrow functional research (therefore teaching) as opposed to cross-functional collaboration amongst faculty.

•	My own work is in the area of market-based assets (also referred to as value networks and value webs) and financial performance. These assets that reside in business networks now represent a substantial part of market capitalization of bricks and clicks companies. How can one value these assets? What are the best ways to leverage these assets to enhance financial performance?