From auditing rural schools under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan as a newly minted Chartered Accountant to decoding the strategic lifelines of India’s most underserved entrepreneurs, Dr Janvi Patel’s career reveals a single unifying theme: giving voice to communities that markets overlook.
Today, as Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Public Policy at IIM Sambalpur, she translates that commitment into research and teaching. During her PhD in Strategic Management from IIM Kozhikode, Dr Patel turned her methodological lens toward action research and ethnography, choosing India’s Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe entrepreneurs as her field, not her dataset. Months spent living and working in the field allowed her to chronicle how resource-constrained founders craft strategy, mobilize collective identity and challenge structural barriers.
The academic community has taken notice. Insights from her fieldwork have travelled to podiums at the Academy of Management (AOM), European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), ANZAM, EURAM, INDAM, and the Strategic Management Forum, where reviewers commended both the rigor of her embedded methods and the practical pathways she sketches for inclusive growth.
Dr Patel’s evolving research interests include rural entrepreneurship, collective entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, unified by a question that animates every project she undertakes: How can strategy become a tool of emancipation for those born outside the mainstream economy? In the classroom, she equips future managers with the same question, challenging them to design ventures that create not just profits, but possibilities.
