Anan Sheth
Assistant Professor
Dr. Anan Sheth is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship. Before joining Cal Poly, Dr. Sheth was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Stevens School of Business, where he worked as a researcher for the Consortium for Corporate Innovation (CCE) – a group of Fortune 500 companies that are interested in deeply understanding corporate innovation. Dr. Sheth also worked as an entrepreneurship & innovation educator at the Stevens Institute of Technology and received recognition from the University’s academic leadership for his exemplary performance in facilitating student learning and development.
Dr. Sheth earned a Ph.D. from Purdue University’s Institute for Innovation Science with a focus on identifying pathways for large firms to build resilience across a variety of different operating contexts. His work has been supported by multiple corporate research grants as well as received a dissertation award from the National Science Foundation.
Between 2011 and 2014, Dr. Sheth co-founded and successfully exited an entrepreneurial venture in the Construction Engineering and Management vertical, which laid the groundwork for his future endeavors – first pursuing higher education in the United States and second as an entrepreneurship & innovation educator.
Dr. Sheth’s most recent research endeavors are dedicated to the overarching objective of fostering corporate entrepreneurship & innovation within large companies. He delves into the challenges of systematically scaling up innovations and assessing risks across the ideation, incubation, and scaling phases of corporate entrepreneurship & innovation. His scholarly contributions span across well regarded academic journals and practitioner-oriented publications including Technovation, the MIT Sloan Management Review, and the International Journal of Project Management. Please see the research tab for a link to his selected publications.
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Education
- BE Civil Engineering (2012) – Manipal Institute of Technology
- MS Civil Engineering (2016) – Purdue University
- Ph.D. Civil Engineering (2021) – Purdue University
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Experience
Assistant Professor on the tenure track
- OCOB at Cal Poly SLO (2024-present)
Post-doctoral research fellow
- Stevens School of Business – Stevens Institute of Technology (2021 – 2023)
Partner
- V-create Architects & AAA+ Turnkey Project Developers – Surat, India (2011 – 2014)
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Research
Current research projects:
Selected peer-reviewed journal publications:
- Sheth, A., & Sinfield, J. v. (2023). Risk Intelligence and the Resilient Company. MIT Sloan Management Review 64(4).
The article describes a process to build risk and opportunity intelligence for resilience across a wide range of changing business contexts.
- Morkan, B., Bertels, H.m., Sheth, A., & Holahan, P.j. (2023). Building Megaproject Resilience with Stakeholders: The Roles of Citizenship Behavior and Critical Transition Mechanisms. International Journal of Project Management: Special Issue on Resilience in Project Studies.
The case study introduces a theoretical model for critical transition mechanisms of scaling project-level resilience from individual-level stakeholder behavior.
- Sheth, A., & Sinfield, J. v. (2022). An analytical framework to compare innovation strategies and identify simple rules. Technovation.
The article introduces a framework to compare innovation strategies on a common basis and identifies simple rules for archetypal innovation forms.
- Sheth, A., & Kusiak, A. (2022). Resiliency of Smart Manufacturing Enterprises via Information Integration. Journal of Industrial Information Integration.
The article conducts a systematic literature review of risk and resilience in manufacturing and introduces a framework for resilience based on complex adaptive systems theory.
- Sheth, A., & Sinfield, J. v. (2021). Systematic problem-specification in innovation science using language. International Journal of Innovation Science.
The article develops a framework and an AI-based tool for the ideation phase in front-end innovation management in small and large companies.
- Sinfield, J. v., Sheth, A., & Kotian, R. r. (2020). Framing the Intractable – Comprehensive Success Factor Analysis for Grand Challenges. Sustainable Futures.
The article builds an improved method for the problem-framing process for wicked problems based on holism and knowledge graphs from search engine data.
