PERSON
C. K. Prahalad
Indian-American business strategist (1941–2010) whose frameworks — core competence, strategic intent, the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, and co-creation — reordered how the world understood competitive advantage over three decades.
Coimbatore Krishnao Prahalad (1941–2010) was one of the most consequential strategic thinkers of the late twentieth century. Born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, he earned a doctorate from Harvard Business School and spent the majority of his academic career at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. His 1990 Harvard Business Review article The Core Competence of the Corporation, co-authored with Gary Hamel, fundamentally reordered how organizations understood competitive advantage. His 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid challenged the global business community to recognize four billion low-income people as entrepreneurs and co-creators rather than objects of charity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Prahalad's intellectual trajectory ran from competitive strategy through global development to value co-creation, but the through-line was constant: the most consequential strategic advantages come from capabilities that reside in the collective intelligence of an organization, and those capabilities are consistently underestimated by the financial logic that dominates