Srinivas (Srini) Venugopal is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Vermont. Srini’s research examines the intertwined nature of consumption and entrepreneurship in subsistence marketplaces where more than a billion poverty-stricken entrepreneurs run micro-enterprises to meet basic consumption needs. His work aims to provide a theoretical foundation for the notion of consumer-entrepreneur duality and test its implications empirically. In a parallel stream of research, he examines how social enterprises entering into contexts of poverty negotiate institutional differences to bring about positive social change. Srini’s dissertation research on subsistence marketplaces has received several discipline wide awards such as the “AMA Entrepreneurial Marketing/Kauffman Doctoral Dissertation Award (2016)” and the “ACR/Sheth Foundation Dissertation Grants in the area of Public Purpose Consumer Research (2015)”.

Prior to his joining the academia, Srini led a technology-based social venture, which focused on delivering educational services to low-income consumers in rural India. He continues to run a social enterprise that is focused on promoting girl’s education in several low income neighborhoods (slums) in the city of Chennai in India. Srini is also passionate about fostering learning about subsistence marketplaces that form the focus of his research. In the past, he has accompanied students on several learning trips to countries such as India, Tanzania, Argentina and Uganda. He has also been the co-instructor for an online course on 'Subsistence Marketplaces' offered to tens of thousands of students across the world on a MOOC platform called coursera.