Biography
Sandeep Pillai comes to the Freeman School from Bocconi University, where he served as an assistant professor in the Department of Management and Technology. Pillai is a scholar of strategy and entrepreneurship who investigates the antecedents of entrepreneurial outcomes in contexts characterized by fundamental product, production, market or regulatory uncertainty, as well as their consequences for industry agglomeration. He relies on historical methods to combine traditional econometric analysis and qualitative archival analysis to study diverse contexts, such as the early American automobile industry (1895-1918), Maoist China (1964-1978), the Italian fashion industry (1945-1980), China’s Treaty Port Era (1842–1949), U.S. medical devices industry (1990-2015), and the Finnish pulp and paper industry (1934-1975). In his second stream of research, he leverages recent work in the philosophy of science to explore how scholars can enhance modes of reasoning, methods and testimonial structures to improve the veracity of claims made in management research. Pillai has published three articles in the Strategic Management Journal. He holds a PhD from the University of Maryland, an MBA from the University of Toronto, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo. Prior to his academic career, Pillai worked for seven years as an electrical engineer.
