Bharat N. Anand

Bharat N. Anand is the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning at Harvard University, and the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Professor Anand is an expert in digital strategy, media and entertainment strategy, corporate strategy, and organizational change. His work has examined competition in information goods markets, focusing on two central challenges that firms increasingly face: “getting noticed” amidst the increasing clutter of alternatives available to consumers, and “getting paid” for what they produce.

His recent book, The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change (Random House) examines digital transformation in content industries, with a view to distilling the learnings from a quarter century of change that might inform digital efforts elsewhere. The book has received acclaim for its perspective on strategy and digital transformation, and was named as one of Fast Company’s top ten business books of 2016, Bloomberg’s “Best Books of 2017”, and received the Axiom Best Business Book Award in “Business Theory” (Silver) in 2018.

Professor Anand's papers have shed light on the roles of branding and advertising as vehicles of matching and information, on competition between cable news networks, and on strategies that firms employ to tackle the challenge of weak or insecure property rights. In prior work, he studied the financing of R&D, the structure of technology licensing contracts, and the industrial organization of financial intermediation markets. His papers have been published in several leading journals in economics, marketing, and strategy, and received various awards.

Professor Anand created Harvard Business School’s first executive program on digital strategies for media companies, and was a faculty co-founder of HBS’ interdisciplinary research initiative on digital issues. He has authored numerous case studies in business and corporate strategy, including those on Danaher, The Economist, International Management Group, News Corporation, Random House, and Schibsted. His research and case writing has received various awards, and his work has been profiled in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., and Bloomberg. His work on digital transformation has influenced both start-ups and established companies, and he has advised leading organizations and entrepreneurs across the globe.

Professor Anand has served as faculty head of the required Strategy course in the MBA program, has taught Strategy in the General Management Program, and has served as faculty chair of various executive programs at the school. For several years, he taught the popular second-year elective course in Corporate Strategy in the MBA elective curriculum, for which he received the Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence at HBS from the MBA class of 2006 and the MBA class of 2007. 

Professor Anand helped create Harvard Business School’s digital learning initiative, HBS Online (formerly, HBX), in 2014, and served as its first faculty chair and Senior Associate Dean. He helped oversee the design and creation of HBX’s digital learning platforms, and created one of its first online courses. HBS Online has received accolades for its innovative approach to online pedagogy, and its virtual classroom has been described by Fortune as the “Classroom of the Future.”

In his current role as Vice Provost, Professor Anand has led Harvard University's efforts to formulate, communicate, and implement strategic priorities around online learning and residential teaching across the University. He was part of Harvard's central leadership team to support and oversee the University’s transition to remote teaching during the pandemic, and more recently he chaired Harvard's Future of Teaching and Learning Task Force that explored post-pandemic digitally-enabled transformative teaching and learning strategic opportunities for Harvard University.

Professor Anand received his B.A. in economics from Harvard College magna cum laude, and his PhD in economics from Princeton University. He is a recipient of the Greenhill Award for outstanding contributions to Harvard Business School, and the Apgar Award for Innovations in Teaching.