Dr Jagannadha Pawan Tamvada BSc (Hons) MSc PhD FHEA
Associate Professor

Dr Jagannadha Pawan is Associate Professor at the Southampton Business School specialising in interdisciplinary entrepreneurship and strategy research. He is also Deputy Director for Impact and Collaboration at the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership that oversees nearly 140 doctoral students in Social Sciences at Universities of Southampton, Portsmouth and Brighton.
His quest for resolving the socio-economic issues facing his home country India drove him to give up his scholarship at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and go to Germany to pursue his PhD in Economics at the Chair of Stephan Klasen, a former student of Amartya Sen, in 2004.
Approaching Development Economics from a new perspective at that time, he examined the factors that shape entrepreneurship in developing countries and the role of entrepreneurship and self-employment for individual welfare at the Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group of the Max Planck Institute of Economics led by David Audretsch.
For his dissertation, he was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society and the Inaugural Best Dissertation Award of the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID).
Following visiting fellowships at the Kellogg School of Management and the Harvard Business School, he accepted a lectureship at Aston Business School in 2009, and subsequently joined the Centre for Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Southampton University in 2013 as a tenured Associate Professor.
Dr Pawan has supervised six doctoral students to completion, and two more of his students are expected to complete their PhD by 2020. He has supervised more than 150 MBA, MSc and BSc dissertations. He won the Kaufman Foundation Best Paper Award at Academy of Management meetings in 2011, and was nominated twice for Vice Chancellor awards at Southampton and for Economic Research Network’s outstanding teacher award.
He is greatly enthused about applying his research for making a difference in people’s lives. He envisioned and co-founded Swatantr (standing for ‘freedom’), a digital ecosystem for supporting grassroots entrepreneurship and innovation in India and around the world in 2016. This subsequently became the global entrepreneurship platform iPowerz that serves to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit worldwide.
Dr Pawan is an alumnus Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning and Narendrapur Rama Krishna Mission, two revered Indian institutions founded on ancient Advaita philosophy. He is a universalist committed to advancing the cause of human wellbeing through his endeavours, and is a founding trustee of the Indian Cultural Association of Dorset, a registered charity in the UK. His blog “From Infinitesimal to the Infinite” can be found here.
Education:
- December 2007: PhD in Economics (Dr. rer. pol, summa cum laude), University of Goettingen, Germany.
- 1997- 2002: Integrated BSc (Honours) MSc (Mathematics), Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Prashanti Nilayam, India
Professional Experience:
- Since May 2013: Associate Professor, Strategy and Innovation Group, University of Southampton
- Since June 2009: Affiliate Fellow, Centre of India and Global Business, University of Cambridge
- October 2009-April 2013: Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Economics, Aston Business School
- September 2004-September 2009: Senior Research Fellow/Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Germany
Awards and Honours (Selected):
- Nominated for Economic Research Network's Outstanding Teacher Award by Aston University, 2013
- Kauffman Foundation Best Paper Award, Academy of Management Meetings, San Antonio, USA, 2011
- Otto-Hahn Medal, Max Planck Society, Germany, 2009
- Inaugural Best Dissertation Award, Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics, Denmark, 2008
- PhD Scholarship, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Germany (2004-2007)