Reed McManigle

Industry/Field

Commercialization

Bio

Reed has 35+ years of experience in managing intellectual property and assisting in the formation and early funding of technology-based startup companies. He was at CMU's Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation from 2006 to 2024. In his later years there, he was the CTTEC Mentor in Residence. He provided direct mentoring support to faculty and PhD students who were seeking to create and grow startup companies around their research results. He worked in all domains including energy, materials, life sciences, robotics, software/AI, chemistry, etc. He managed CTTEC's gap funding program; investor relations; entrepreneur matchmaking; and Enterprise Creation intern and project course activities.He helped to manage CMU's NSF I-Corps activities and served as a Business Mentor for three CMU teams in the national I-Corps program. He also helped to manage the Innovation Commercialization Fellowship program. He was also involved in various regional economic development activities; helped to organize various annual venture fair events, and represented CMU, CTTEC and CMU startup companies in a wide variety of situations.

He currently provides consulting services to universities and regional economic development efforts that seek to improve their systems for translation of academic research into commercialization activities. His major projects are 1) supporting a regional effort to obtain NSF Engines funding to foster energy /cleantech innovation, entrepreneurship and workforce development, through the Resilient Energy Technology and Infrastructure (RETI) Consortium (led by West Virginia University, and involving Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh); and 2) supporting efforts by the U.S. Research Impact Alliance (USRIA) to facilitate the transition of research to commercialization through mentoring and recruitment of advisors, factional C-leveled team members, and full-time commercialization leads for tech-based startups.