A former Silicon Valley engineer & McKinsey strategy consultant, Mike Grandinetti has been continuously active in the fields of innovation, entrepreneurship, human-centric design and digital marketing as a operating executive and educator. He served as a C-level executive of eight successful enterprise tech startups. Two went public on the NASDAQ. Seven were ultimately acquired by corporate strategics including IBM (twice), Oracle and Symantec. He’s raised over $1B cumulatively.
Currently, he's a member of the faculty at Brown, Harvard, & Rutgers, where he teaches Master's and Executive Education courses on innovation, entrepreneurship, design thinking, marketing & transformative leadership. He's been affiliated with MIT in a variety of capacities, including MIT Sloan Sr. Lecturer, MIT $100K Startup Competition Judge, MIT Enterprise Forum Instructor & MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Planning team member and panel moderator for over 20 years. In addition, he has numerous affiliations with U California Berkeley, most notably Program Development Fellow for the Sutardja Center of Entrepreneurship and Technology and as Faculty member and Judge for the Engineering Leadership Professional Program. He was named Financial Times Professor of the Week, and has won numerous Professor of the Year and Global Teaching Excellence Awards. He was part of a team that won a global innovation award from the AACSB for a newly designed MBA curriculum.
He’s Co-Founder and CEO of Global Venture Catalyst. GVC is a new educational model that helps professionals and top STEM and MBA students come together to innovate with professional up-skilling, high impact design and development projects, perspective exchange, and recruiting. Industry collaborators include Applied Materials, Dassault, Elkem, Medtronic, and Zimmer Biomet.
He’s an independent innovation consultant. His clients have included Accenture, Capital One, Dell / EMC, Ferrari, IBM, Intuit, Maersk, McGill University, Nestle, Novo Nordisk, Pirelli, Quest Diagnostics & the governments of Canada & Denmark.
He’s the co-host of a podcast series on innovation. He’s a speaker on the TEDx circuit & an instructor & mentor in numerous top tier startup accelerators. He's led over 200 hackathons and design sprints globally.
He is the winner of the 22nd annual Rosoff Award for Excellence in Diversity for his leadership in promoting diversity & inclusion in the tech industry, a winner of the Rutgers College of Engineering Medal of Excellence Award for Career Achievement and a member of the National Engineering Honor Society.
He’s been published under his byline in Harvard Business Review Italy, Wharton at Work, Forbes, Money, Global Banking and Finance Review, MarTech Today, Intellectual Property Watchdog, Boston Innovation and is the co-author of a Berkeley Haas Case Series case study. He’s been regularly quoted in national and international business publications.
He received his MBA from Yale, where he was named the annual Jess Morrow Johns Memorial Scholar and a Yale Teaching Fellow.
