Vish Krishnan
Jacobs Family Chair in Management and Engineering Leadership & Professor of Innovation, Technology & Operations | UC San Diego
La Jolla, CA, UNITED STATES
Vish Krishnan has developed unparalleled expertise in researching and teaching innovation, entrepreneurship, and product management.
Media
Publications:
Documents:
Photos:
Videos:
Audio/Podcasts:
Biography
Krishnan is a chaired professor and the faculty director of Rady’s Entrepreneurship Initiative, CIID. One of the Rady School’s founding faculty bringing deep start-up/business experience in California and Texas, Krishnan has developed unparalleled expertise in researching and teaching innovation, entrepreneurship, and product management. He has led Rady School’s signature core course series, Lab to Market, which allows Rady students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in entrepreneurship by developing their own businesses. In addition, Krishnan also serves as the associate director for the Institute for the Global Entrepreneur, a joint venture between the Rady School and the Jacobs School of Engineering – where he holds a joint appointment. In his research, Krishnan works on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of innovative operations and ventures, and collaborates closely with the School of Medicine through grants from the National Institute of Health and the State of California. He has been a founding member of start-up teams and is an advisor to a number of startup teams and major international companies. Krishnan received his doctoral degree from MIT and serves in the editorial positions of elite academic journals in the areas of innovation, entrepreneurship, and product/operations management. He has been named the Most Valuable Professor by Rady students 4 times during the last decade and has been invited to teach at MIT and Harvard University.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Science and Technology
New Product Development
Innovation & Change Management
Operations Management
Commercialization
Accomplishments (1)
Most Valuable Professor
Four time winner
Education (3)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Ph.D., Engineering/Management
Carnegie Mellon University: M.S., Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras: B.Tech., Mechanical Engineering
Links (3)
Media Appearances (2)
Rady and Jacobs Schools at UC San Diego Announce Two New Endowed Chairs
SD Metro
2018-10-28
The Jacobs Family Chairs in Engineering Management Leadership have been awarded to the two professors leading the UC San Diego Institute for the Global Entrepreneur, which is the centerpiece of the collaboration between the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Rady School of Management. The awardees are electrical and computer engineering professor Sujit Dey and Rady School of Management professor Vish Krishnan. Their endowed chair professorships are reserved for faculty with joint appointments between the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Rady School of Management...
New California Center for Service Science Seeks to Create Value for Researchers, Students and Public
University of California Merced
2015-01-22
“There are people at all the UC campuses who focus on parts of this,” said Maglio, with the School of Engineering. Maglio, along with Professor Vish Krishnan of the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, formed the cross-campus center with seed funding from the UC Office of Research, the UC Merced Office of Research and Economic Development and the School of Engineering...
Articles (5)
Product Innovation in Technology Supply Chains
Social Science Research Network
Junghee Lee, Vish Krishnan, Hyoduk Shin, Oleksiy Mnyshenko
2018 Managers introducing new products with advanced component technologies frequently face the dual task of managing both revenues and profits. This task is made challenging, in part, due to the tendency of new technologies to traverse a sequentially downward path of gradually lowering costs and prices, which limits their initial availability and affordability, crimping market coverage and revenues. In this paper, we focus on this product management challenge, show how it is amplified in a supply chain, and propose a new degree of freedom in a supply chain, namely innovation investment anchoring, that offers product managers and their firms the ability to expand market coverage and improve both revenues and profits. After motivating with a detailed industry field-study, we formally characterize the problem and show that deliberate choice of the innovation investment anchor leads to greater investments in innovation, revenues and profits. We compare and contrast product quality improvement and cost reduction investments in a product management setting. These findings have subtle, but important, implications for firms launching innovative products and aspiring to expand product sales and profits. Specifically, innovating firms in a supply chain should broaden the quest for an investment anchor, offer them incentives to invest, and finely tune the level of innovation investment with product qualities, prices, and quantities for increasing revenues and profits.
The Impact of Release Management on Open-Source Software Co-Creation
Social Science Research Network
Wei Chen, Vish Krishnan, Kevin Zhu
2018 The open-source software (OSS) production model has been gaining ground and even expanding to a broader class of products. A central virtue of OSS is co-creation through contributions and feedback from the user community, yet our knowledge of how to coordinate and maximize the benefit of such co-creation for market success is limited. In this paper, we propose that deliberate product release timing can be an important capability to orchestrate open source community contributions and maximize their benefit. We develop, formalize, and estimate a dynamic structural model to study the impact of product release management as a coordinating mechanism in peer production. We find that a deliberate and moderate release frequency, contingent on the installed base of the project, its quality enhancement, and the license type of the software, contributes to project success. Our results show that it would be optimal for early-stage projects to release more often. As the installed base increases, it is beneficial to release less often. We also find that there exists a curvilinear (inverse-U) relationship between the release frequency and the community contributions. Hence, excessive releasing may risk exhausting the community. Furthermore, even though the project may benefit from a new release, there also exists a release cost. The OSS team then has to balance between the two by carefully managing the release pace. We also find that projects with different license types may have different optimal release timing. These results may have important implications for managing technology-enabled, crowd-based collaboration in open innovation communities beyond open-source software development, launch, and adoption.
Timing of Promotion for Charity Crowdfunding Projects: An Empirical Study of The Role of Mid-Period Momentum
Social Science Research Network
Seung Jong Lee, JaeHong Park, JungHee Lee, Vish Krishnan
2018 Given the serve competitions among charity fundraising platforms, around 50% of crowdfunding projects have failed to meet their goals of obtaining the targeted amount of money. Charity crowdfunding platform managers need to increase the prospective donor’s awareness to their charity project success. One way to increase their visibility and attract the attention of potential donors is for them to locate their projects on “featured slots” (e.g., top pages of project lists) on a fundraising platform website. While previous studies showed that the promotion of featured projects via online platforms may influence fundraising success, little is known yet about how the dynamics of the promotion in the featured slots influences the amount of pledged money for charity fundraising projects over time. Also, while few studies showed the U-shape pattern of projects, what has been lacking is to show why crowdfunding projects have a U-shaped dynamic pattern. To answer these questions, we empirically show that promoting crowdfunding projects during the middle period would obtain more pledges. This results in the U-shaped dynamic pattern, which, eventually, leads to the crowdfunding project’s success. Thus, the goal of this study is to help charity crowdfunding platform managers design strategies to get more pledges and improve the odds of success of charity crowdfunding projects.
Service Design for improved satisfaction: Decoding the mechanism for impact of patient callback in emergency healthcare
Service Science
Viswanathan Krishnan, Kanetaka M Maki, Edward M Castillo, David A Guss
2015 Healthcare delivery is becoming a significant proportion of the service economy around the world. Within healthcare, the emergency department (ED) constitutes one of the most challenging areas of service delivery. Patient (customer) arrival is highly unpredictable, job scope is variable and uncertain, and timely service response is essential to save lives. In addition, emergency physicians and hospitals may soon be monitored and compensated based on patient satisfaction measured after service delivery. In this paper, we seek to understand how a process design piloted at two academic EDs—involving the addition of a new process step that uses health provider follow-up patient calls after discharge from the ED—influences patient assessment of the service. We examine the overall impact of this process redesign on patient satisfaction as measured by the “likelihood to recommend” question on patient surveys and develop an identification strategy to uncover the mechanism by which callbacks influence patient satisfaction. Our findings indicate that the follow-up callback design improves patient appraisals across the board, and not just as a service recovery tool where it moderates the assessment of select patient groups. These findings can help hospitals implement a redesign of the ED service process for callback in an effective manner. Underlying fundamental implications and future work possibilities are discussed.
Pricing information goods: A strategic analysis of the selling and pay-per-use mechanisms
Marketing Science
Sridhar Balasubramanian, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Vish V Krishnan
2015 We analyze two pricing mechanisms for information goods. These mechanisms are selling, where up-front payment allows unrestricted use, and pay-per-use, where payments are tailored to use. We analytically model a market where consumers differ in use frequency and where use on a pay-per-use basis invokes a psychological cost associated with the well known “ticking meter” effect. We demonstrate that pay-per-use yields higher profits in a monopoly provided the associated psychological cost is low. In a duopoly, one firm uses selling and the other uses pay-per-use. Here, in contrast to the monopoly, selling yields higher profits than pay-per-use. We demonstrate that, surprisingly, the profits of both duopolists can increase as the psychological cost associated with pay-per-use increases. Next, we show that uncertainty in consumer use frequency does not affect pay-per-use in a monopoly, but lowers profits from selling. In a duopoly, both the seller and the pay-per-use provider obtain lower profits when use frequency is uncertain. We also analyze how pricing mechanism performance is affected if the firms cannot commit to prices, if the pay-per-use provider offers a two-part tariff, and if consumers are risk-averse.
Social