One of nine children, he obtained an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Madras and went on to a diploma at IIM, Ahmedabad as a member of the first graduating batch. He followed that with a DBA from Harvard Business School in 1975.
Prahalad started his academic career at the University of Michigan in 1977, and in 1990, he and Gary Hamel co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review titled, “The Core Competence of the Corporation.” In this influential article, building on the work of Edith Penrose who first stressed the importance of the unique capabilities of a firm, Prahalad and Hamel encouraged corporate executives to “identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible.” In their 1994 book, Competing for the Future, Prahalad and Hamel analyzed how established market leaders like IBM tend to lose ground to innovative upstarts like Apple – IBM failed to see the future of the personal computer because it was too focused on maintaining its leadership in the mainframe business.