Nirmalya Kumar
2011 Ranking: #26
Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Global Village Award
Nirmalya Kumar is a professor of marketing at London Business School, where he is also co-director of the Aditya Birla India Center. His work focuses on marketing and the rise of India as an economic force.
Kumar is the author of several books. Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation (2004); Global Marketing (2005); and Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge (2007), focused on marketing strategy, where Kumar is also credited with introducing the concept of "3Vs": valued customer, value proposition and value network.
More recently, he has written about India and its rise to economic superpower status. In India's Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking on the World (2009), Kumar provides an insider's guide to doing business with Indian leaders and companies.
His latest book is India Inside: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West, written with London Business School colleague Phanish Puranam (2011). A keen collector of the work of Indian artist Jamini Roy, Kumar is said to have the largest collection of Roy paintings outside of India.
