Rate My Professor Dan Wadhwani

Dan Wadhwani is the Director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Orfalea Director’s Chair in Entrepreneurship, and Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. He earned a Ph.D. in History, concentrating in business and social history, from the University of Pennsylvania, a B.A. in History magna cum laude from Yale University, and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Entrepreneurial Management at Harvard Business School. Wadhwani began his academic career as Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School from 2002 to 2006. He then joined the Eberhardt School of Business at the University of the Pacific, where he held the Fletcher Jones Chair in Entrepreneurship from 2006 to 2020, progressing from Assistant Professor to tenured Full Professor. Since joining USC Marshall in 2019 as Visiting Professor, he advanced to Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship in 2020, launched the Founder Central Initiative in 2021, and assumed the directorship of the Greif Center in July 2025 for a three-year term. He has held visiting professorships at Copenhagen Business School and Kyoto University and serves as Venture Partner at Impact/Velocity Venture Capital.

Wadhwani’s research focuses on historical approaches to entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial processes driving socio-economic change, business history, and the uses of history in organization studies. He has co-edited books including Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods (Oxford University Press, 2014), Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism (Edward Elgar, 2007), and special issues in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (2020) and Organization Studies (2018). Key publications feature articles such as “Theorizing with Microhistory” (with Andrew Hargadon, Academy of Management Review, conditionally accepted), “Geopolitical Jockeying: Economic Nationalism and Multinational Strategy in Historical Perspective” (with Christina Lubinski, Strategic Management Journal, 2020), “Social Imaginaries of Entrepreneurship Education” (with Christoph Viebig, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2021), and “History as Organizing” (Organization Studies, 2018). His contributions have earned the Williamson Midcareer Award for Leading Contributions to Business History (Business History Conference, 2020), Henrietta Larson Award for best article in Business History Review (2011), and multiple teaching awards, including the Derek Bok Center Award at Harvard (2003, 2004) and Annual MBA Teaching Awards at Pacific (2007–2009, 2011–2012). Wadhwani previously chaired the Academy of Management Management History Division and is president-elect of the Business History Conference. At USC, he developed courses like BAEP 455: Founder’s Dilemmas and BAEP 477: Entrepreneurial Imagination, directed research and graduate programs, and mentored founders through accelerator initiatives.