Mukti Khaire

Mukti Khaire is the Girish and Jaidev Reddy Professor of Practice at Cornell Tech and in the Johnson School at Cornell University. She received a PhD in Management in 2006 from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. Before that, she completed a Masters in Management from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Bombay and a Master of Science in Environmental Science and a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from the University of Pune, India. Prior to joining Cornell Tech in 2016, she was on the faculty of Harvard Business School (Entrepreneurial Management Unit; 2005-2016) and spent a year as Visiting Faculty in Brown University (Sociology; 2015-2016).

Mukti’s research focuses on entrepreneurship in the creative industries, such as art, advertising, architecture and design, fashion, film, music, publishing, and theater. In particular, she is interested in understanding how entrepreneurs create markets for new categories of cultural goods by constructing their value, while also changing consumers’ beliefs about what attributes of cultural goods are appropriate and valuable. In this vein, Mukti studied the creation of a market for modern Indian art and the rise and establishment of the high-end fashion industry in India. Her work, which has been published in leading business and management journals, has shed light on the structure and functioning of creative industries and the business and societal implications of entrepreneurship in the cultural sector. Mukti has also authored 35 teaching cases on firms in the creative industries.