On 16 April 2010, Prahalad died at the age of 68 of a previously undiagnosed lung illness in San Diego, California.

[12] At 19, he had finished his BSc degree in physics from Loyola College, Chennai, part of the University of Madras,[13] and joined Union Carbide, where he worked for four years.

Four years later in 1964 he enrolled for the pioneer batch of Postgraduate Programme in Business Administration at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and graduated in 1966.

[14] At Harvard Business School, Prahalad wrote a doctoral thesis on multinational management in two and a half years, graduating with a DBA degree in 1975.

In early 1990 Prahalad advised Philips' Jan Timmer on the restructuring of this electronics corporation, then on the brink of collapse.

In 2004 Prahalad co-founded management consultancy The Next Practice, to support companies in implementing the strategies outlined in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, which continued in operation as of 2015[update].

He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 1999.

Prahalad and Gary Hamel wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review magazine titled "The Core Competence of the Corporation" in May/June 1990.