Erik is a sought-after consultant and authority on innovation and go-to-market strategies for creating and shaping new mass markets. He brings a unique combination of theoretical rigor with “P&L practicality” to his work, as his frameworks are designed to work in the real world of trade-offs, limited time, and constrained resources. An MBA and PhD in business strategy and sustainability, Erik has extensive field experience, having guided start-ups, green-field ventures, and product teams in Eastern Europe, Africa, India, and South America over the past 20 years. His passion and conviction are the product of getting on the ground and living in the very target communities and markets he aims to reach—from the post-Soviet communities of the Baltic countries, the slums of Kenya and Nigeria, to the villages of India and Ghana.

A frequent speaker on innovation, social entrepreneurship, and bottom-of-the-pyramid, his work is published in leading management journals, including the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Sloan Management Review, and the journal Innovations. He also writes for The Guardian’s sustainable business, and is the course instructor for the popular MOOC “Financial Modeling for the Social Sector” offered in partnership with Acumen Fund’s educational arm, +Acumen.

Erik is a Partner of TIL Ventures–an innovation consultancy that helps global corporations build the capability for discovering and creating new markets. He is a core faculty member of The Intrapreneur Lab, and the former Head of the Frontier Markets Initiative at Cornell University, a collaboration between Entrepreneurship at Cornell and the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Erik holds a PhD in Management from Cornell, an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received the Norman Block Award for highest academic achievement, and a BA magna cum laude from Wake Forest University.

Email: erik.simanis@gmail.com
Phone: 607-379-1330

111 Stewart Ave, A-SE
Ithaca, NY 14850