Mike Grandinetti is on a constant mission to explore what’s next operating at the point of intersection of applied technology, innovation and execution. He’s a serial tech entrepreneur, board member, AI and innovation strategy consultant, VC fund EIR, and professor in the practice. A former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and McKinsey consultant, Mike has played a key C-Suite leadership role across 8 tech startups, resulting in two NASDAQ IPOs and 7 strategic exits to acquirers including IBM and Oracle. 

Alongside his entrepreneurial achievements, Mike is an award-winning educator, having been named the Financial Times Global Professor of the Week and Professor of the Year numerous times. He is currently an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School where he has been focused on teaching Harvard MBAs how to use agentic coding tools and how to apply AI to every step of the entrepreneurial journey. He is also engaged in the joint Harvard School of Applied Engineering Sciences joint Master of Science in Engineering / MBA program. Several unicorns have recently graduated from this degree program. He writes the monthly “Future-Proof with AI” column for the Harvard Business School AI Institute. He is affiliated with Harvard Rock Center of Entrepreneurship & the Harvard Innovation Lab, where he leads workshops and mentors student founding teams. He was the first professor globally to use the HBS Foundry AI-enabled entrepreneurship platform in a live classroom in his Harvard entrepreneurship course. He is engaged in research at the point of intersection of AI & entrepreneurship with the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. He has also teaches graduate and / or executive education courses at Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia University, Cornell, NYU Abu Dhabi, Babson College and the University of Michigan. He teaches on the Maven e-learning platform, backed by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen – Horowitz He will begin teaching executive education courses at Singapore Management University in September of 2026.

Previously, Mike spent over a decade on the faculty at MIT Sloan School of Management, teaching engineers, MBAs and executives about innovation, entrepreneurship, disruptive business models, Technology translation, Transfer and Commercialization and Leadership. He has also taught at UC Berkeley, Oxford, Rutgers, and the Danish Technical University, ESADE and Prince Mohammed Bin Salman College of entrepreneurship and technology.

Today, he’s deeply engaged in AI Executive Education on a global scale, teaching custom courses to senior executives on 5 continents. His clients have spanned a wide range of industries, from residential construction to commercial construction to healthcare to biotech to athletic footwear and apparel to luxury goods to retail banking to industrial manufacturing companies to sovereign wealth funds to professional services firms to industrial manufacturing companies and beyond 

He’s led over 200 “hackathons”and design sprints globally, for corporations including Education First, Capital One, IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, Nestle, Nike, and Mass General Hospital, top-tier educational institutions including Harvard Medical School,  Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, UC Berkeley and impact organizations including Engineers Without Borders, MacArthur Foundation, Design for America, and the battered woman’s sanctuary, Rosie’s Place. He served for over a decade on the WGBH Corporate Executive Council, the flagship of the US public broadcasting system.  Also serves on the board of directors of Boston AI Week, an annual event that features 300+ AI-related sessions across the Boston AI ecosystem

He’s a long serving organizing team member and senior advisor to the MIT CIO Symposium, where he regularly moderates panels and gives talks. He’s a judge in the annual MIT CIO of the Year award. He’s also a frequent keynote speaker and has delivered several TEDx talks on entrepreneurship and AI. He has delivered keynotes at the MIT Enterprise Forum, Harvard Business School Open and User Innovation Conference, The Google Cloud DevFest on AI & Tech Innovation,  Eastern Academy of Management, Microsoft European User Group Meeting, Mid-Atlantic Association of Colleges of Business Administration, the Research Excellence Summit in Washington DC and Riyadh Saudi Arabia, the International Startup Festival, the International Conference on Data and Capacity Building ( panel), the Cap Gemini VIP Customer Conference, the Instructure Canvas (LMS) annual global meeting, and many others.

He enthusiastically mentors the next generation of founders in several of the world’s top startup accelerators, including Berkley Skydeck, Techstars, the HBS Rock Center, Harvard Innovation Lab and Y Combinator.  

Mike is the recipient of the 2026 Global Excellence Thought Leader of the Year Award in the innovation category.

He has been published in Harvard Business Review Italy, Wharton at Work, INSEAD Knowledge, California Management Review, and The Journal of Creativity special edition on AI. He was a finalist in the U California Berkeley Haas School of Business annual Case Study of the year Competition. He has written columns for or has had his byline published in New Jersey Law Journal, Global Banking and Finance Review, Intellectual Property Watchdog, Forbes, Money, Data Center Journal and CIO Dive.

He earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering at Rutgers, where he was named to the National Engineering Honor Society and the National Mechanical Engineering Honor Fraternity. He was president of the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was awarded the Rutgers College of Engineering Medal of Excellence for Career Achievement. Has also served on the Board of

Directors of the Rutgers College of Engineering,  and was named Alumni of the Year.

He earned his MBA from Yale, where he was named the annual Jess Morrow Johns Memorial Scholar, was the recipient of the Procter & Gamble leadership award and was named a Yale Teaching Fellow.