• SUMMARY

    "anti-fragile" disruption-seeking technocrat with a penchant for recognizing and leading communities to leverage change and chaos, variability and ambiguity to maximize innovative thinking. Strategic Partnership Executive for Technology Discovery and Business Development straddling technology r&d and business development through strategic alliances with investors, entrepreneurs and universities. Helps employer swiftly and deftly advance emerging technologies to solve for the company’s challenges/opportunities while leveraging its size, scale and spend in technology to exert strategic influence on the technology eco-system and recognizing and developing opportunities for revenue growth.

    Focused on helping build and enable entrepreneurial eco-systems in underserved cluster economies across the USA and EMEA. Traveled the world and bridged many a cultural chasm.

    Specialties: Linking Strategy to Execution, Workforce Enablement, User Behavior and Technology Development, Education Management, Education Technologies, Sustainable Transit, Funding Innovaton, Global Delivery, Compute Optimization Strategies, Innovation: design thinking, creativity, sustainable enterprise and learning, Knowledge management, Managing: technology

  • What I Do

    I help enterprises swiftly and deftly advance emerging technologies to solve for the company’s challenges/opportunities while leveraging its size, scale and spend in technology to exert strategic influence on the technology eco-system and recognizing and developing opportunities for revenue growth

  • EXPERIENCE

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    NikiaDx, Levvel/IO

    Venture Builder | Innovation-as-a-Service

    July 2017 - Present

    Business-Development-as-a-Service to discover, design, build, test and validate solutions to help transform business’ at large enterprises by designing, building & delivering curated innovation partnerships with lines of businesses, technology platforms to drive agility and risk appetite in regulated environments and transformation ops & strategic advisory work to clients.
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    Wells Fargo

    Technology Discovery and Business Development Executive

    – Jun 2017

    Accelerated enterprise innovation with an outcome-based Innovation Lab, a Fintech accelerator to discover and enable external innovation and a design-think process to help identify and direct innovation toward desired outcomes for the business. Founding member of the team to help align Vendor Management, Technology Innovation, Industry & Investment relations and TMT IPO/M&A.

     

    Executed a federated Technology Innovation Portfolio for Enterprise via intersection of Strategic, Human & Intellectual Capital. Nurtured collaboration between IT, business partners, technology providers, investors and academia to enhance translation of ideas to execution. Evangelized opportunities for strategic partnerships that enable new and incremental revenue growth

     

    Executive Education Workshop @ Harvard Business School via Wells Fargo | Boston, MA | 2016

    for rethinking corporate strategies to drive change in the enterprise in an innovation economy

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/re-thinking-strategy-innovation-economy-synopsis-harvard-govindan/

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    Queens University of Charlotte

    Board of Advisors: Knight School of Media and Communication

    – Apr 2017

    The School receives generous support from the Knight Foundation and is positioned to become a leader in the study and development of digital and media literacy; our degree programs reflect a commitment to giving individuals the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create digital media content in a networked environment. Our School of Communication is the only one in the nation to bear the Knight name, and is differentiated by its emphasis on deploying technology to a civically engaged end. By bridging community engagement and new media innovation, our programs are unique among our peer institutions.

    As part of the strategic plan for the Knight School, we are taking a dynamic approach to building connections between communication, information and technology, and the varied media industries that are driving and benefiting from applied innovation. We have expanded our reach beyond more traditional media partnerships; in our curriculum and our external initiatives, we are training individuals to be sophisticated information analysts, with a deep knowledge of how information flows, and the vocabulary and skills needed to make it meaningful. To this end, we are building partnerships with those private and public sectors that present the greatest entrepreneurial opportunities for applied technology.
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    Charlotte Business Advisory Committee

    Chairman – Dec 2014
    The Business Advisory Committee is a community based business committee appointed to provide input, recommendations and advice to the Charlotte City Council on ways the City can help businesses in Charlotte start, grow and succeed, with a particular emphasis on small businesses.

    The Committee consists of 20 members. Members are appointed by the Charlotte Mayor and City Council with representation from Charlotte's diverse business community, including representatives from a broad segment of both large and small businesses located and operating in Charlotte.

    http://www.charmeck.org/city/charlotte/nbs/ed/BAC/Pages/WhoWeAre.aspx
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    Merrill Lynch

    SVP, Strategic Partnership and Marketing Executive, Technology Discovery and BizDev – Feb 2014
    Key driver in: building and enabling entrepreneurial eco-systems in underserved cluster economies across the USA and EMEA; accumulating business technologies' strategic drivers and emerging technology drivers from the intersection with Tech Strategy, EA Technology and federated Innovation groups; syndicating a technology research operating model integrating industry research, university research and internal subject-matter-expertise for advising Strategic Investments/IP Commercialization. Also responsible to build and manage a matrix of stakeholders in the technology eco-system (VCs, Public Tech Companies, Private Tech Companies and BAC's Tech Investment Banking), to introduce and enhance adoption of emerging technologies and their application to business strategies. Leading efforts to craft and sustain significant relationship capital intelligence of both ‘supply’ (technologies) and ‘demand’ (businesses) sources for emerging technology & business needs as well as helping discern ways in which client/user behavior impacts technology development.
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    Works Film Studios and Th3Doors with ArtConnect 3D

    Advisor - Alliances – Feb 2014
    Next Generation Visual Effects platform for movie and video production. Advanced 3D technologies for Art, Architecture and other leading business cases
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    WEF - Charlotte Shapers

    Advisor – Dec 2013
    Introducing the Global Shapers Community

    50% of the world’s population is under the age of 27, the majority of whom live in urban areas. With this in mind, we are becoming increasingly aware that solutions to our global challenges must purposefully engage youth, at all levels – locally, regionally, nationally and globally. This generation has the passion, dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit to shape the future. The state of the world today has never been more complex, in many ways we are entering uncharted territory – a period of extraordinary opportunities, yet fraught with unprecedented imbalances and tremendous risks. In this context, it is significant that the millennial generation consider themselves as “active agents of change” rather than passive bystanders. In a recent study, 92% agree that the world must change; 84% consider it their duty to drive this change; and almost 82% believe they have the power to make it happen. In large part, this generation is increasingly self-empowered and given access to information and technology, which has catalysed tremendous opportunities for interaction and collaboration. The World Economic Forum has successfully established a history of engaging young leaders to positively and proactively impact the global agenda. In addition to its existing community of Young Global Leaders, who are in their mid to late 30s, the Forum is establishing a special community of young people in their 20s. This new community – the Global Shapers Community – will provide youth with a global platform to shape the future – integrating the personal, community and global dimension. Through the unparalleled convening power of the World Economic Forum, the Global Shapers Community is diverse in demographics, geographical areas and sectors. However, it is united by a common desire to channel the members’ tremendous energy and enthusiasm into building a more peaceful and inclusive world.

    www.charlotteshapers.org
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    Foundation Ten10

    Secretary – Dec 2013
    Foundation Ten10, will be dedicated to grass-roots fundraising for the direct support (not relying on other NGOs or similar institutions) of education directed at (the broadest definition of) mentally challenged kids. The foundation gets its name from its desire to mobilize a billion (Ten9) people to passionately donate $10 each to reach a fund of $10 billion (Ten10).
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    Proverbs 22:6

    Advisor - Proverbs226.org – May 2013
    To Develop Kids with an incarcerated parent into a college graduate.

    The epidemic that America faces today…a Father-less Generation and the Prison Industrial Complex.

    The single greatest factor contributing to the exploding rate of deviant behavior in our country is that of children being raised in fatherless homes. Violent crime, substance abuse, unwed mothers, chronic depression, and an abundance of other social ills, including poverty, can be traced back to children having an absent father.

    When the prison population grows, a rising rate of incarceration feeds small and large businesses such as providers of furniture, transportation, food, clothes and medical services, construction and communication firms. "Prison Industrial Complex" (PIC) is a term used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Activists have described the Prison-Industrial Complex as perpetuating a belief that imprisonment is a quick fix to underlying social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy.

    "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." (Proverbs 22:6)
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    New Leaders for New Schools

    Advisor: NLNS Charlotte – May 2013
    Through our partnership with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), New Leaders is committed to driving an improvement in school performance and closing the achievement gap.

    Our efforts begin with the New Leaders we recruit, train and place to help students of poverty and students of color prepare for college, career and citizenship. School reform is flourishing in the Charlotte area, and CMS is widely regarded as one of the leading urban school systems in the country. The infrastructure, policies and practices are in place to raise student achievement to their highest levels, but to do so we must develop a pipeline of capable and passionate leaders who are dedicated to serving in Charlotte’s highest need public schools.
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    Gen 44 - Obama Victory Fund 2012

    Raiser/Gen44 – Oct 2012
    As President Obama told us in 2008 and continues to remind us now, the work did not end on Election Day. We made commitments to each other about what we hope tomorrow looks like and what we believe our country can be and they are commitments we must fight for every day. From our commitment to these ideals, we created Generation Forty Four or Gen44 for short – a council to cultivate and empower a rising generation of leaders in the Democratic Party. Gen44 will work with this groundbreaking group, all under the age of 40, to serve as a platform for political mobilization and to ensure that President Obama and Democrats have the resources and infrastructure needed to implement the change we believe in
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    Merrill Lynch

    SVP, Strategic Partnership and Marketing Executive for Technology Innovation Portfolio – Aug 2012
    Key driver in: building and enabling entrepreneurial eco-systems in underserved cluster economies across the USA and EMEA; accumulating business technologies' strategic drivers and emerging technology drivers from the intersection with Tech Strategy, EA Technology and federated Innovation groups; syndicating a technology research operating model integrating industry research, university research and internal subject-matter-expertise for advising Strategic Investments/IP Commercialization. Also responsible to build and manage a matrix of stakeholders in the technology eco-system (VCs, Public Tech Companies, Private Tech Companies and BAC's Tech Investment Banking), to introduce and enhance adoption of emerging technologies and their application to business strategies. Leading efforts to craft and sustain significant relationship capital intelligence of both ‘supply’ (technologies) and ‘demand’ (businesses) sources for emerging technology & business needs as well as helping discern ways in which client/user behavior impacts technology development.
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    Bank of America

    SVP, Tech Research, Innovation and Evangelization – Dec 2009

    Sustain capability for Enterprise Technology to research the Frontiers of technology and assist Stakeholders in immersing in this research to make informed decisions that impact the Technology strategies that are then evangelized for adoption by the associates.

    Current initiatives include innovation around Identity and Security, Cloud Computing, Mobility and Unified Collaboration.

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    Bank of America

    SVP, Center For Future of Banking – Nov 2008

    Participated in a pilot effort to learn and apply Design Thinking to Innovation for Consumer Bank Transformation in alliance with the Center for Future of Banking. The initiative produced broad frameworks of insights around human behavior and where the bank has opportunities to engage with the consumer in the future.

     

    Center For Future Banking @ MIT Media Lab via Bank of America | Boston, MA | 2008

    how emerging technologies and insights into human behavior can transform the customers' experience and elevate the role of the bank in their financial lives

    https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/center-for-future-banking/overview/

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    Bank of America

    SVP, Global Delivery Transformation – Jun 2008
    Craft, plan and execute a Global Delivery Strategy for the Network Computing Group to leverage offshore capabilities for Tech Service Delivery.
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    Bank of America

    VP, Infrastructure Service Delivery – Dec 2006
    Infrastructure Service Engagement and Account management for CMWBT - Architecture, Governance & Compliance team
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    Freelance/Self-Employed

    M&A Technology/Data Engineering Consultant – Mar 2005
    M&A Consulting .. Tech
  • co-curricular accomplishments

     

    Fintech inclusion summit, san francisco, ca | 2018
    role: alliance builder

    Focused developer-product manager community initiative driving Fintech collaboration in Bay area.

      https://fintechdevsandpms.com/inclusion-summit 

     

    Engage ventures, atlanta, ga | 2017
    role: advisor & alliance builder

    A corporate venture fund focused on driving scalable innovation in the enterprise.

    http://www.engage.vc 

     

    Carolina Fintech hub and Queen City Fintech incubator, Charlotte, nc | 2014-2017
    role: alliance builder

    A Fintech ecosystem leveraging financial institutions’ appetite for disruptive innovation, technology and banking talent in the region and investments and curated content nurturing the Fintech revolution

    http://www.carolinafintechhub.org | http://www.qcfintech.co/

     

    fis’ Vc Fintech accelerator, little rock, ak | 2017
    role: advisor & alliance builder

    A corporate Fintech accelerator by FIS focused on driving scalable innovation in financial services.

    https://www.venturecenter.co/vcfintech/  

     

    ICAT AT COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON, Charleston, sc | 2015-2016
    role: advisor & alliance builder

    A student startup accelerator program focused on building a generation of startup founders. Founding advisor of ICAT Fintech startup and autonomous banking platform, Monotto.

    http://www.monotto.com 

     

    Future of work, washington, dc | 2013-2017
    role: advisor, investor & alliance builder

    A close knit group of non-profits, corporations, foundations, investors and startups focused on workforce development for the future of work impacted by artificial intelligence/automation, the gig economy, shift toward lifelong learning and competency-based hiring.

    New America (https://www.newamerica.org/work-workers-technology/about/)

    Walmart FDN (http://giving.walmart.com/opportunity) | Jobs For the Future (http://www.jff.org)

    Office of Education Technology (https://tech.ed.gov/) | Degreed (http://www.degreed.com)

    University Ventures (http://universityventures.com/) | GSV Capital (http://www.gsvcap.com)

     

    Fintech innovation lab, new york, ny | 2008
    role: founding bank liaison & alliance builder

    A highly competitive 12-week program that helps early-to growth-stage startup companies refine and test their value proposition with the support of the world’s leading financial service firms.

    http://www.fintechinnovationlab.com/

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    MY MOTTO

    "be truthful, gentle & fearless"

  • EDUCATION

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    Karnatak University

    Bachelor's in Computer Science Computer Engineering
    Describe your studies, involvements, and accomplishments at this school.
  • REFERENCES

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    Joe Walsh
    Energy policy, corporate strategy and global business development

    Manoj is a change agent and community leader who has emerged as a hub of the business community in growing and evolving Charlotte. For a growing city to become a world class city, leaders need to emerge with an agenda that goes beyond their own advancement. Manoj is an asset to Charlotte, to his company, and to everyone in his network.
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    Martha Rick
    Program Management Executive , SVP at Bank of America

    Manoj was an outstanding partner and dedicated professional throughout the whole time we worked together. He is an outstanding leader with a proven track record of delivery - always on time and strives for early delivery without compromising quality. Manoj is a team player and contributes in a meaningful way to common goals. He is an outstanding resource and asset to any manager or employer.
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    Tim Bendel
    SVP, Senior Data Scientist

    Manoj was a pleasure to work with on the Consumer Bank Transformation project. He has a great ability to innovative and create solutions for many different type of problems. He was willing to take on any task.
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    Puneet Kumar
    Senior Vice President at Bank of America

    Manoj has continually been a knowledge leader that I turn to for his opinion. His quick understanding of new concepts paralleled with his ability to assist people is exemplary. Manoj's focus and understanding of the big picture has been extremely valuable for me and I would have to say for the Bank as well.
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    Carol Korn-Smith
    Founding Principal at Infrastructure Solutions, Inc.

    Manoj is a detailed oriented manager who connects the dots as a strategist, and an ability to execute.
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    Jeff Carter
    Chief Technology Officer - Eyelock

    Manoj is the type of rare leader who has both a strong vision and the ability to execute. His work on the Consumer Bank Transformation ethnographic work was top notch. Every step of the work was accomplished with professionalism and excellence.
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    Chad Marshall
    Destroyer of limited thinking. I'm the Michael Bay of Risk, Governance and Control, sans lens flare.

    Manoj and I met while working on a complex strategy effort designed to align technology business needs to the business needs of our many diverse internal line of business partners. He demonstrated a high degree of expertise in technology management and a very strong business acumen. His insight into technology strategy development was clear and immediately actionable. His style was open, insightful and inviting. As complex questions arose Manoj rapidly resolved the language to the root concern and delivered those concerns in a manner that was clear and actionable to executive leadership. I highly recommend him for his leadership, communication and technical and financial services business acumen.
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    Jim Dossey, MS, MBA, JD
    Partner - Small Business, Estate Planning, and Intellectual Property at Dossey & Jones, PLLC; Registered Patent Attorney

    Manoj is a big picture thinker with the ability to take a high level strategy and make it executionable. Manoj also has exeptional skills managing diverse, multicultural virtual teams as well as the ability to effectively communicate up and down the organization.
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    Manish Sharma
    Executive Director, Prime Brokerage IT at JP Morgan

    Manoj is one of the rare talents who always manage to see beyond the obvious irrespective of the context. I've constantly been in awe of his ability to never lose sight of the bigger picture both at work and at a personal level. That and his amazing ability to organize people and activities effectively, are amongst his standout qualities.

    I had the pleasure of working with Manoj as a fellow consultant at Metlife during the mid-90s and would love the opportunity to do so in the future.
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    Srini Ganapathy
    Customer Experience Manager at Bank of America

    I worked with Manoj while we were formulating a Global Operating Model for our large organization. His thought leadership, global insights and experience were immensely valuable for us to fomulate our global strategy. In addition, Manoj spearheaded some of the work streams to leverage process and function maturity as factors that positively affect globalization. He also led a team of high performance professionals to implement the global transformation plans successfully. Manoj has the unique ability to integrate vision, strategy, innovation, inclusive culture and effective pragamatism towards successful implementation of global initiatives. Thank you Manoj!
  • CONTACT ME

  • LET'S CHAT!

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    Phone
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    San Francisco Bay Area