Aakanksha Mishra

About

Overview

Aakanksha Mishra is a PhD candidate in Management at Bayes Business School, City St George’s, University of London. Her research lies at the intersection of entrepreneurship, organizational theory, and gender, with a particular focus on entrepreneurial legitimacy, founder decision-making, and founding team formation. Her work examines how entrepreneurs respond to legitimacy threats, such as negative investor feedback, and how these experiences shape strategic positioning, venture persistence, and entrepreneurial team composition. Using experimental and field-based methods, Aakanksha’s current research explores gendered responses to investor evaluation, founder resilience under legitimacy threats, and the effectiveness of different strategic approaches to entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Aakanksha worked across consulting, strategy, and entrepreneurship roles with organizations including KPMG, EY, Grant Thornton, and GMR Hyderabad International Airport. She has also founded and co-founded ventures in education and consumer entrepreneurship and has worked as a research assistant on projects related to AI, trust in digital environments, and decentralized organizations with leading strategy scholars. Aakanksha holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Software Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering.

Qualifications

• MBA, Indian School of Business, India, 2016 - April 2017
• B Tech, Delhi Technological University, India, August 2009 - May 2013
• PhD, City, University of London, United Kingdom, September 2023

Languages

English (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review), French (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review) and Hindi (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review)

Expertise

Primary topics

• Entrepreneurship

Research students

1^stsupervisor

• Professor Vangelis Souitaris, Professor of Entrepreneurship

2^ndsupervisor

• Professor Sam Kamuriwo, Professor of Strategy and Innovation