Kiran Awate joins management faculty
Kiran Awate has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Management at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business.
He is one of nine new full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members at Pamplin this fall. Their addition reflects the college’s commitment to hiring faculty to further strengthen its teaching, research, and business outreach, particularly in areas concerning business analytics, innovation and entrepreneurship, and sustainable global prosperity.
Awate received his Ph.D. in management from Ohio State University in 2018. He earned an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India, and a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pune, India.
His research interests lie at the intersection of organizational learning and innovation.
His dissertation examines how firms learn from failures during the drug discovery process in the pharmaceutical industry. His work highlights how failures help firms reconsider their existing beliefs and seek out better and more refined theoretical explanations.
In another project, Awate finds evidence that patent infringement lawsuits undertaken by U.S. pharmaceutical firms against firms from developing countries result in “unintended knowledge spillovers, subsequently helping these firms improve their innovation capabilities.”
Awate won the best research presentation award twice at the Hayes Research Forum. His work was nominated for the best paper award at the annual conference of the Academy of International Business.
He has taught undergraduate courses in international business at Ohio State University.
Before embarking on his Ph.D. studies, Awate worked in the software technology industry for about nine years in India, the Middle East, Britain, and the U.S.
