Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad was the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business in the University of Michigan, USA. He was born on 8 August 1941 in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, British India. He earned a degree in physics from the University of Madras and went on to receive a post-graduate diploma in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, in 1966. He followed that with a doctor of business administration from Harvard Business School in 1975.

Prahalad started his academic career at the University of Michigan in 1977, spending the next 30-plus years in the business education field. In 1990, Prahalad cemented his place in the corporate strategy and management world when he and Gary Hamel co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Reviewtitled, â??The Core Competence of the Corporation.â? In this influential article, Prahalad and Hamel encouraged corporate executives to â??identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible.â? In their 1994 book, Competing for the Future, Prahalad and Hamel analyzed how established market leaders tend to lose ground to innovative upstarts. The book famously showcased how IBM was blindsided by Apple, failing to see the future of the personal computer because it was too focused on maintaining its leadership in the mainframe business. He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 1999. In 2009, he was named Padma Bhushan 'third in the hierarchy of civilian awards' by the Government of India.