Neil Kane is an educator and author at the Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. He is also a leading authority on technology commercialization, entrepreneurship, and innovation. He is the former co-Executive Director of the Illinois Technology Enterprise Center, at Argonne National Laboratory, and was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Illinois and Northern Illinois University. He has been the CEO of startup companies in areas as diverse as consumer packaged goods, toys, nanotechnology, Internet marketplaces, medical diagnostics, and energy storage.
Neil holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois and an MBA from The University of Chicago. He attended graduate school at the Australian Graduate School of Management and studied in Japan on a scholarship from JETRO. Named a 2007 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, he twice attended their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He has been recognized for Outstanding Entrepreneurship by the National Science Foundation and twice was an invited witness on technology transfer for the U.S. House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Research & Science Education. He was also a mentor in the very first cohort of NSF’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program taught by Steve Blank at Stanford University. He has been a contributor to Forbes on topics related to startups and leadership.