C. K. Prahalad

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad (1941 to 2010) was an India born business professor and author who spent most of his career on the faculty of the University of Michigan business school. He studied at Loyola College in Chennai and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad before earning a doctorate at Harvard Business School. He became one of the most influential management thinkers of his generation for his writing on corporate strategy, including the idea of a company core competence and his argument that businesses could profitably serve, and help lift up, low income consumers at what he called the bottom of the pyramid.