Jerry Engel is a veteran of Silicon Valley. After a successful career advising and founding entrepreneurial ventures, he joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 to found the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship. Mr. Engel is an adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business and instructs in both the School’s MBA and Executive Education programs specializing in Entrepreneurship, New Venture Finance, Corporate Innovation, Venture Capital and Private Equity. Professor Engel is also co-founder and General Partner of Monitor Venture Partners, a venture capital firm organized in collaboration with the Monitor Group, investing in early stage technology ventures.

In Professor Engel’s broad background in entrepreneurship and innovation, he has founded successful entrepreneurial firms, taken several publics and sold others to major corporations. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of several high potential venture capital-backed and privately held firms. Previously he was the Managing Partner of Entrepreneurial Services for Ernst & Young, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the firm’s National Director of Capital Resources, a practice specializing in new venture financing. Professor Engel is experienced in building programs to develop entrepreneurship faculty, with a specialty of working with business executives, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to develop them into highly effective college instructors. Since 2005 he has helped to create and lead the Intel Entrepreneurship Initiative, which has trained hundreds of faculty in more than 40 sessions conducted throughout the world. The Initiative has included five global symposia held at the University of California-Berkeley that have brought together leading alumni of the program for intensive “train-the-trainer” instruction. Professor Engel’s most recent research and publications focus on the nature of innovation processes in firms, communities and global networks. Professor Engel is the 2010 recipient of the NCIIA – Olympus Corporation Lifetime of Educational Innovation Award.