Recognition for Contributions to Subsistence Marketplace Research and Education
At Gies, we are proud of the many efforts our faculty take to educate our students. In exemplary circumstances, their research and activities receive recognition for their instrumental role in making key advances in the service of Business on Purpose.
Viswanathan wins AMA Lifetime Achievement Award
Gies College of Business Professor Emeritus Madhu Viswanathan has been awarded the 2021 Marketing & Society SIG Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Marketing Association. The honor recognizes those who make a significant contribution to research advancing the study of marketing and societal issues.
“I’m so humbled to be honored in this way,” said Viswanathan. “I’m extremely grateful because there are so many people deserving of this award. Honestly, I have to pinch myself sometimes, thinking about the journey I have been on in my career. It’s been eye-opening to see the problems that people face around the world, and I feel very fortunate to have hopefully helped in a very small way. The award is also a reminder of how much more work that is left to be done.”
Empathy sums up the seventh Subsistence Marketplace Conference
In its August-September edition, Central Illinois Business captured the essence of Madhu Viswanathan’s seventh Subsistence Marketplace Conference, which took place from June 22-24 at the I Hotel in Champaign. The professor of Business Administration and Diane & Steven N. Miller Centennial Chair at Gies College of Business created the biannual conference 15 years ago.
Coursera Transformation Award
Madhu Viswanathan has won the Transformation Award, Coursera’s top honor among its 2017 Outstanding educator awards. The award was granted in light of his Understanding Subsistence Marketplaces Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).
“Professor Viswanathan’s course and his work in subsistence marketplaces have inspired thousands of individuals to create sustainable jobs and enhance the welfare of people and communities in poverty-stricken areas of the world,” Coursera states in its blog post about their 2017 awards.
UPCEA International Program of Excellence Award
Congratulations to Madhu Viswanathan on winning the 2017 University Professional and Continuing Education Association’s (UPCEA’s) International Program of Excellence Award! The award acknowledges his achievements in teaching the Coursera-based Subsistence Marketplaces course.
UPCEA is the leading association for professional, continuing, and online education. According to the award committee chair, “After a nationwide search, Madhu Viswanathan has been voted to receive the UPCEA International Leadership Award. The Association encourages its member institutions and organizations, to extend their outreach globally and to facilitate international or global professional and professional, continuing, and/or online education in creative and innovative ways. He has proven exceptional leadership, creativity and commitment in achieving international impact.”
Sustainable Product and Market Development for Subsistence Marketplaces Named Best Course 2011
University courses in entrepreneurship are better"”more useful, more real, more likely to produce actual companies"”than they have ever been.
Both the socially conscious and the profit-minded see opportunity in a global market of up to four billion people living in poverty. Yet in most entrepreneurship classes, financially comfortable students develop products for customers who look a lot like themselves. Madhu Viswanathan, a professor of business administration, believes experiencing subsistence markets is critical to serving them. His graduate-level class spends five weeks working through a poverty simulation, in which students role-play visiting a pawn shop, trying to obtain medicine, and agonizing over buying food or paying rent.