Thinkers50 Hall of Fame Inducts Smith’s Anil Gupta, Haiyan Wang

The Smith School’s Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang, MBA ’95, are 2024 inductees into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame. They’re recognized for “three decades at the forefront of analyzing globalization trends,” according to Thinkers50, which publishes a biannual list as “the essential guide to which thinkers and which ideas matter now.”

The Thinkers50 Hall of Fame inductee announcement for Gupta and Wang further states: “Born in India and China respectively [Gupta and Wang] founded the Washington DC-based China India Institute in 2007, leveraging their combined 60 years of research, consulting and global business management.”

Wang an adjunct professor of strategy at INSEAD, and Gupta, the Michael Dingman Chair in strategy, globalization, and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, have co-authored The Silk Road Rediscovered with Girija Pande, Getting China and India Right, and The Quest for Global Dominance with Vijay Govindarajan.

Gupta, also co-author of Smart Globalization, and Global Strategy and Organization, recently directed the launch of UMD-LinkUp AI Maps as the world's first tool for mapping the creation of jobs requiring artificial intelligence skills.

In a conversation with Thinkers50 co-founder, Stuart Crainer, Gupta and Wang recently discussed commonalities between China and India, including how both nations, despite their contrasting political systems, emerged as the world’s fastest-growing economies. Watch the discussion, in which they further examine core cultural values shared by the two countries and address the new realities of globalization, including the significance of semiconductors, chips, data centers, and the influence of AI.