One of Business Week magazine's top 25 most influential people in e-business will speak on March 19 at the University of Colorado's College of Business.
Mohanbir Sawhney has gained acclaim for advising more than 25 companies while writing pace-setting predictions about e-commerce of the future. His work covers the mechanics of e-marketplaces, neutral online e-commerce hubs where buyers and sellers get equal treatment and examines why business-to-business e-commerce will become more prevalent than e-tailing.
Sawhney is the McCormick Tribune Foundation Professor of Electronic Commerce and Technology at the Kellogg Graduate School at Northwestern University.
Sawhney will speak at 5 p.m. March 19 in room 224 of the College of Business building on Regent Drive in Boulder. His talk will address "Strategy and the Start-Up Firm" and is sponsored by the college's Robert H. and Beverly A. Deming Center for Entrepreneurship and the Marketing and Information Systems division.
"Mohanbir Sawhney is one of the foremost experts in e-commerce today," said Dipankar Chakravarti, professor of Marketing and The Ortloff Professor of Business. "We are honored to have him speaking to students and participating in the Deming Center's activities."
Professor Sawhney's visit is particularly significant in view of the college's first offering of the Accenture Graduate Seminar in e-Business. The advanced interdisciplinary course in e-business strategy is being taught for the first time this spring semester by Professors Chakravarti and Ramiro Montealegre.
Accenture has played an instrumental role in establishing the course at the CU-Boulder College of Business. In addition to state-of-the-art classroom instruction in e-business realities, the students also are working on real-life e-business projects with key local companies as part of the course requirements.
Crain's Chicago Business named Sawhney a member of "40 under 40" in 1999, a select group of young business leaders in the Chicago area. As the director of the Center for Research in Technology, Innovation and E-Commerce at the Kellogg School, he was named the Outstanding Professor of the Year at Kellogg in 1998.
Sawhney's research includes business-to-business e-commerce, marketing and mediation in the network economy, knowledge management and entertainment marketing. His research has been published in Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Interactive Marketing. He is the co-author of "The Seven Steps to Nirvana: Strategic Insights into eBusiness Transformation and TechVenture -- New Rules on Value and Profit from Silicon Valley."
A sampling of his speaking and consulting clients includes Amgen, Bank of America, Dell, Dow Chemical Eli Lilly, Estee Lauder, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Merrill Lynch and Motorola. He serves on the boards of directors and strategic advisory boards of several e-commerce and technology start-ups and is a fellow of the World Economic Forum.
Sawhney holds a doctorate in marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and other degrees from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, the University of Pennsylvania and the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi.
The Deming Center for Entrepreneurship is a joint program of the Colleges of Business and Engineering at CU-Boulder. For more information, call Cindy Scheopner at (303) 735-4970.