Reuben Abraham
Reuben is a professor at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. He is the Director of the Emerging Markets Solutions Initiative, a center at the ISB (set up in partial collaboration with Cornell University) with a focus on developing and implementing market-based solutions, harnessing the efficiency and productivity of the private sector and capital markets, to promote economic development. He serves on the global board of directors of George Soros’ Economic Development Fund (SEDF), which aims to catalyze growth in emerging markets. Under the aegis of SEDF, he has helped set up a unique India-focused SME early stage fund with Google and Omidyar Network as co-investors. He serves as an independent director on the board of Indiaco Ventures, a leading publicly listed Indian financial services company; advises a large real estate company; and is an advisor to three start-ups in the real estate, retail and ethnographic research space. He was also a TED Global Fellow for 2007 and and a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. He founded and runs the International Private Enterprise Group (IPEG), a New York based network of professionals, which promotes the role of the private sector, capital markets and technology in catalyzing economic development in emerging markets.
Before ISB/Cornell, he finished his Ph.D. from from Columbia University. For his doctoral research, he looked at the relationship between telecommunications and economic development in developing countries. Specifically, he looked at whether telecommunications services, by virtue of their role as carriers of information, reduced the information asymmetries inherent in unorganized markets (for an abstract of his dissertation, click here). During his time at Columbia, he was an Associate Fellow in Global Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, and also a Fellow at the Public Policy Consortium. He was a Sloan Foundation/CITI Telecommunications Fellow in 2000.
Earlier, he was a co-founder of the RISC (Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons) project. RISC/Deeshaa aimed to correct rural market inefficiencies by providing a shared infrastructure platform for user services in a commercially sustainable way by aggregating rural demand and coordinating infrastructure services. During the past six years, he has worked at three Columbia University research centers, including the Earth Institute, the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information (CITI), a telecom research center at the Business School, and the Interactive Design Lab. In addition, he also did a consulting stint at the World Bank, where he evaluated the economic impact of telecom on countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mercosur region, India, and China.
Reuben completed his M.A. and M.Phil from Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, he finished a B.A. from Bombay University and a masters degree in journalism from the Asian College of Journalism. He was co-founder of Just Another Magazine (J.A.M) and was later involved in another start-up in the telecommunications/content space. During his time in India, he was also a freelance writer, contributing to several leading newspapers.
If you have the time, feel free to head over to his personal blog, Zoo Station, or to the Indian Economy Blog, where he is a co-author.