Leading the Charge: Raghu Dharmaraju’s Journey to Scalable Sustainability
Raghu Dharmaraju MBA ‘07, CEO of ARTPARK
From clean tech to global health and artificial intelligence, Raghu Dharmaraju MBA ’07 has dedicated his career to sustainability through innovation for impact at scale. Dharmaraju is one of the 20 for 20 Notable Alumni honored in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise (CSGE)at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
Dharmaraju is the CEO of ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology Park) a nonprofit organization fostering innovations in AI and robotics. His commitment to sustainability roots from personal experiences, growing up in a region of India scarce on power and water. Since graduating, Dharmaraju has been helping to develop and scale impact-focused innovations in clean tech, global health, agriculture, and AI. He has built a new business at a Fortune 500 company, two social enterprises, and two nonprofits.
The presence of the CSGE influenced Dharmaraju’s decision to pursue his studies at the SC Johnson College. The vision of leveraging business and innovation for environmental and societal benefit made him realize, “This is what I would like to plan my life around,” he says.
Learn more about Dharmaraju in this Q&A.
Building a career in sustainability
Q. What drives your commitment and focus in environmental and social impact?
Dharmaraju: My interest in social and environmental impact has roots where I grew up—a region with extreme temperatures, rampant power cuts, water scarcity, and violent Maoist extremism. Over time, through exposure to the sustainability and social justice movements, I’ve come to feel that that gives meaning to my work. In places like India, the effects of social and environmental injustices are especially tangible. For example, pollution and climate change disproportionately hurt people at the bottom of the economic pyramid. But they also have poorer access to healthcare. How do you keep going unless you believe what you are doing can meaningfully move the needle? What are we leaving behind for our kids?
Initially, I had focused on specific innovations like solar power for rural homes and incubators for babies in low-resource settings. Directly lighting up homes and seeing babies saved was deeply satisfying, but over time, I realized that without addressing fundamental systems design issues, there is no lasting change at scale. COVID, for example, made clear that we need to reimagine our public health systems. Technological innovations can have a transformative positive impact, but not in isolation. Now, much of my work involves working closely with national, state, and city government systems while also developing and enabling innovations that make those systems more people-centered.
Q. Describe the biggest challenge you encountered as you built your career in sustainability and how you overcame it.
Dharmaraju: The biggest challenge was making my own path and finding my own philosophy. There was no predefined path or one role model to follow. There was a lot of learning in uncharted areas and leading at the same time. Heavily influenced by Stu Hart (world-renowned scholar on the implications of poverty and the environment on business) and C.K. Prahalad’s Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid thinking, I returned to India within three years of graduating from the Johnson school, giving up a comfortable corporate career in environmental technologies.
Unfortunately, where we worked—in the remote villages with shocking energy, sanitation, and health infrastructure—we didn’t see any fortune. It took a great deal of collective commitment and personal sacrifice on our part to not simply “postpone” impact goals and pursue markets up the pyramid.
Through those experiences, I understood that many systems that serve the vulnerable billions—such as the public health systems in developing countries—are characterized by market failures and disincentives to adopt innovations. So lasting scaled impact requires driving systems change, working with key stakeholders, and co-innovating at the same time.
Now, our work at ARTPARK at IISc (Indian Institute of Science) is deeply influenced by that philosophy. We work with national, state, and city governments and support nonprofits to co-innovate AI-based solutions and integrate them into their systems. In the aftermath of COVID, we built a dengue (a climate-aggravated infectious disease) prediction system that’s now integrated into the public health operations of Karnataka—a state of 60 million population. We are also building native language tools for frontline health workers leveraging generative AI for national-scale mHealth [mobile health] programs. And 90% of our work lies beyond AI—in stakeholder collaborations, in policy and capacity building, and systems transformation.
Career advice
Q. Can you share any insights or lessons learned from your experiences that may inspire current students who want to be sustainability leaders? What advice would you give them?
Dharmaraju: There is a lot of comfort in operating from a distance in roles that involve advising and consulting. But relevance and insights on how things happen and how things need to change come from actual doing. Specifically, I highly recommend two types of immersive experiences of at least a year each in length.
- Spend time on the ground in operating roles, immersing yourself in the contexts and settings of people you may be hoping to help.
- Work with organizations such as national and state governments that create policy and run the systems that impact those people. Understanding both the users/people and the systems can be quite powerful as you search for solutions to intractable challenges.
What do you do to recharge?
Dharmaraju: Nature walks, reading, meals with my wife and kids, local ethnic immersions. It roots me to why my work matters and energizes me to continue.