Research Interests: Early-stage Venture Financing, Venture Failure/Termination, Accelerators/Incubators, Family Business and Entrepreneurial Networks, Minority Entrepreneurship, Corporate Entrepreneurship, Startup Leadership, and Corporate Governance
Professor Sumit Kumar Jaiswal's research examines how new ventures emerge, secure resources, and sometimes fail in institutionally constrained environments. He earned his PhD in Strategy from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, where his doctoral dissertation, Rise and Fall: Essays on Survival and Failure of New Ventures, analysed early-stage venture dynamics in emerging markets and received the Industrial Finance Corporation of India (IFCI) Best Thesis Proposal Award.
Methodologically, Professor Jaiswal's work draws on large-scale secondary data, experiments, and qualitative approaches to understand how investors, entrepreneurs, and institutions shape venture outcomes. He has presented his research at leading international conferences, including the Academy of Management, the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC), and the Academy of International Business (AIB), and received multiple honours, including Best Doctoral Paper (IMRC 2024), Best Paper in Entrepreneurship (ANZMAC 2023), and Runner-up Best Paper (India Strategy Conference 2023). In 2025, he was selected as one of 25 doctoral scholars worldwide to participate in the Babson Doctoral Consortium.
Before entering academia, Professor Jaiswal worked as a Senior Engineer at Larsen & Toubro, co-founded a venture in the healthy food sector, and later served as a Buddha Fellow, partnering with women entrepreneurs in rural Madhya Pradesh. These experiences inform his teaching philosophy, which emphasises the integration of theory and practice. In the classroom, he encourages students to engage critically with entrepreneurial and strategic dilemmas, institutional constraints, and ethical trade-offs in contemporary organisational contexts.
Conference Proceedings
Working papers
Cases
Jaiswal, S. K. (in press). From stove to startup: The making of a community-driven social enterprise. In Context-inspired entrepreneurship cases from India.