Vinod Jain received his PhD in Strategic Management and International Business from the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland ion 1994 and later taught there from 2005 to 2012. At Maryland, he was also the Founding Director of the federally funded Center for International Business Education and Research as well as Academic Director, China Executive MBA program and Associate Research Director. Since leaving Maryland, he has been a visiting/term professor in China, Denmark, Finland, India, and at the Rutgers Business School, Newark and New Brunswick.
A Fulbright Scholar, Vinod is the recipient of the prestigious Krowe Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Maryland. He has designed and chaired thought-leadership All-Academy Symposia at annual international conferences of the Academy of Management on topics such as "Business Models in the New Economy" (200), "Democratization of Education: e-Learning in a Knowledge Economy" (2013), and "Global Strategy, Innovation, and Leadership" (2011).
Having taught "global strategy" at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business and elsewhere for over ten years, Vinod published a textbook on this theme in July 2016 (Global Strategy: Competing in the Connected Economy, Routledge), which has been used in MBA programs in the U.S., Canada, and Germany.
Vinod’s interest in digital strategy began in the heady dot.com days of 1998, when he launched an online IT recruitment firm, which, after some initial success, lost most of its clients in the early 2000s, a result of the dot-com burst. In the Spring of 2000, he ran a six-Saturday senior executive seminar on eBusiness Strategy. The seminar began on April 1, 2000, by which time, unbeknown to him, the dot-com world had already begun to unravel. Later that year, he designed and chaired an all-Academy symposium on "in Business Models in the New Economy" at the annual international conference of the Academy of Management in Toronto, Canada. During 2013-2014, he completed a research study on "capability building and innovation in the offshore IT services industry in India and China", funded partially by Ernst & Young through the Institute for Emerging Market Studies, Beijing and Moscow. The study involved in-person longish interviews with senior and top-level executives of about two dozen IT services companies and some of their clients, mostly at their premises in India, China, and United States. Vinod has continued his interest in digital business and strategy every since.
Before returning to academia, Vinod worked in industry for many years in middle and senior executive positions with British and American multinationals, including Macmillan Publishers (Vice President), Molins (Manager Coordination), and Coca-Cola (Marketing Research Executive). He has conducted over a hundred executive and scholarly seminar in Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, China, India, and the United States, and has been active on many boards and professional and trade associations.
In addition to his PhD from the University of Maryland, Vinod has M.S. in Management from UCLA, and M.S. and B.S. (Honors) in Statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute. He is a member of the Academy of Management, Academy of International Business, Mensa, and a former Board member of TiE-DC, the Washington D.C. chapter of TiE.org, one of the world’s largest associations of entrepreneurs. Vinod served on the Maryland/Washington D.C. District Export Council from 2008 to 2016, on which he was appointed by the Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce. And, he was President of the Toledo Area International Trade Association during 2000-2002 and served on the Board of Governors of Ohio’s IT Alliance during 2000-2002.