Jeff Skinner
Executive Director of the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital
Jeff Skinner is a Teaching Fellow of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and teaches entrepreneurship courses at the School including the Entrepreneurship Summer School and Innovation to Marketexperiential course. He specialises in commercialising early stage technologies, principally from universities and has co-founded over thirty new ventures. Since joining the school in 2007, Jeff served as the Executive Director of the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital where he led many of the co-curricular activities supported by the Institute, including all competitions, the London Entrepreneurship Review and the TELL Series.
Prior to joining the School, Jeff was commercial director at University College London (UCL), where he built its Technology Transfer division – including the creation of two seed-funds and new units to stimulate consultancy, industry engagement and spin-out creation. Working alongside senior academics, he co-founded more than 30 technology-based spin outs that collectively raised more than £30 million in first round capital. He also introduced management education for engineers and created the first Research Masters Programmes at UCL.
Jeff remains deeply involved in technology commercialisation through teaching, consulting and speaking around the world. He chairs the Review Committee of the Alliance of Technology Transfer Professionals –the global technology transfer professional body – and is past president of the leading UK and European Technology Transfer Associations (PraxisUnico and ASTP Proton). He is author of the Leadership Foundation’s publication Commercialisation Skills for Academics and Researchers and has written more than 20 teaching case studies, covering many aspects of university technology transfer. Jeff has also spoken at TEDx.
Before joining UCL, Jeff led technology commercialisation at Hoechst Celanese Photonics in New Jersey and was previously photonics research manager at General Electric. His first degree was in physics and he holds a PhD in thin film photonics from UCL and a MBA from LBS.
