Pune, Maharashtra, India
Hi, I'm Dr. Bala Ramadurai — entrepreneur, professor, innovation coach, author, and podcaster. I'm the CEO & Co-founder of Spirelia, where we build AI-powered tools to help companies innovate with confidence—bridging gaps between R&D, IP, and product development. With 15+ years of experience across academia and industry, I've partnered with organizations like GE, Mercedes-Benz, Samsung, Salesforce, Forvia, and DRDO to drive innovation, intrapreneurship, and strategic foresight. I hold a PhD from Arizona State University, a B.Tech from IIT Madras, and was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Politecnico di Milano. I've taught over 110,000 learners through institutions like IIT Madras, NPTEL, IIM Kozhikode, Universidad Panamericana (Mexico), and SIBM Pune. I'm the author of Karmic Design Thinking—a Buddhism-inspired approach to human-centered innovation—plus three other books including a technology forecasting handbook. I hold 3 US patents from my time at GE. I co-host four podcasts: Books and Stuff, Podcast Enterprise (Star Trek), Remember the Cant (The Expanse), and Thirukkural a Day. I also speak at tech conferences—most recently EmacsConf 2025. Beyond work, I'm a birder, amateur astronomer, and passionate traveler (22 countries). I speak English, Hindi, Tamil, and Sanskrit, with working knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian. Let's connect if you're into design thinking, tech forecasting, or want to geek out over innovation, sci-fi, or Tamil classics.
As CEO & Founder of Spirelia (https://spirelia.com), I am dedicated to empowering growth-oriented companies to innovate with confidence. We are developing an AI-powered platform (UttishtaAI, KarmajaAI and NarasimhaAI) to help clients pinpoint "where to innovate" and guide them on "how to innovate". Drawing on my extensive background in innovation, design thinking, and IP, I lead customer engagement, sales, business development, and establishing foundational operations. I leverage my industry experience to develop use cases and build relationships, driving our mission to provide integrated, actionable innovation guidance.
- Teach Design Thinking as a practical application oriented course to help undergraduate students in Technology - Students have applied the concepts of Karmic Design Thinking in real world problems. - Teach Agile in Innovation for final year students - 2024-25 for them to work on real world problems and generate prototypes - Taught in 2021 (remote), 2022 (remote), 2024 (in-person), 2025 (Summer)
- Designed the 12-week Design Thinking for Data-Driven App Development course for IIT Madras' BS online degree program - Coached the students and course instructors to take a lead on executing their ideas in developing apps using Design Thinking principles Course available on https://study.iitm.ac.in/ds/course_pages/BSCMS3001.html
Along with Prof. Ashwin Mahalingam, Siddharth Maturi, Nithin Kurian, Suprativ Das and Sam Paul, we launched this course on NPTEL - https://balaramadurai.net/blog/2018/11/22/Design-Thinking-A-Primer-a-MOOC/ (Over 80,000+ learners enrolled so far) - Offered in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 - Will be offered till the end of 2026. Along with Prof. Dmitry Kucharavy (https://seecore.org), we launched a course on Technology Forecasting in NPTEL (Checkout https://swayam.gov.in). (Over 1000+ learners enrolled so far) - Offered in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 - Will be offered in Jan 2026.
I teach workshop-based hands-on courses for students to look at business scenarios from the customer perspective, systematically. Courses taught to MBA, MBA (Innovation and Entrepreneurship) and Post Graduate Diploma in Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship - Karmic Design Thinking A four stage (2500 year old) process to gain customer perspective and solve problems systematically. Finally package the solution using feedback from peers) - Technology Forecasting A four stage methodology to help business decision makers make informed, data driven and knowledgeable decisions on technology