Pratima Bansal

Pratima "Tima" Bansal is a Canadian management scholar and the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Business Sustainability at the Ivey Business School, Western University. Her research focuses on the intersection of corporate strategy, systems thinking, and sustainable development. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Academy of Management, and has received the Hellmuth Prize for Achievement in Research and the Panmure House Prize.

Education

Bansal earned a BA (Hons) in Economics from the University of Calgary in 1983 and an MA in Economics from the University of Western Ontario in 1984. She completed her doctoral studies in management studies at the University of Oxford, receiving her MPhil in 1993 and her DPhil in 1996. Her doctoral thesis, titled The Corporate Response to Ecological Issues, examined how firms respond to environmental concerns.

Bansal has held multiple editorial roles within the premier journals of her field. She served as an Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) from 2010 until 2013 and later as a Deputy Editor from 2016 to 2019.

In 2025, Bansal was invited to deliver the Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies at the University of Oxford, a series in which a leading international academic presents lectures that subsequently form the basis of a book published by Oxford University Press. In the same year, she delivered the Adrian Fernando Memorial Lecture at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, in which she discussed why sustainability-related education does not stick in business schools.

Institutional Impact

Bansal has founded and led several organizations designed to bridge the gap between academic research and corporate practice:

Network for Business Sustainability (NBS): Founded in 2003, NBS was established as a response to the research–practice gap in business sustainability. It has grown into a network of more than 35,000 researchers, managers, and students from around the world who contribute to and follow NBS's work. NBS produces systematic reviews of academic literature translated into evidence-based reports for managers, which it terms "Knowledge Syntheses." It has collaborated with more than 30 organizations across industries such as finance, agriculture, and construction, and applies systems thinking to help organizations navigate systemic challenges, Her longitudinal studies, including "Evolving Sustainably: A Longitudinal Study of Corporate Sustainable Development" (2005), examined how firms integrate social and environmental concerns into their core strategies over time.

In more recent years, her research has moved into systems thinking in business. She examines the dimensions of time, space, and scale in strategy, This perspective holds that the long-term health of the firm depends on the stability of the natural and social systems in which it is embedded.

Through Innovation North, she has developed frameworks for systems innovation that encourage firms to account for systemic feedback loops rather than relying on linear innovation models. Her research and expert commentary have appeared in international news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.

Awards and recognition

Bansal's contributions have been recognized with high-level academic honors:

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2018): Elected for her work in organizational sustainability. Fellow of the Academy of Management (2020). HEC Montréal and the Université de Montréal (2022), and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2023). Hellmuth Prize for Achievement in Research (2021): Western University's highest research award.