Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship

Jim Jen

Director, Corporate Startup Lab
Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Jjen@andrew.cmu.edu

Jim Jen is a Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. In addition to teaching, he is also the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Corporate Startup Lab (CSL).

The CSL is a Swartz Center-Tepper initiative that conducts research and develops tools to help companies better adapt and integrate entrepreneurial best practices into their own innovation practices, helping leaders better encourage entrepreneurship and manage their innovation portfolios. The CSL also offers a unique project course on corporate entrepreneurship in which interdisciplinary teams of graduate students across the university partner with large companies to test and develop real startup ideas brought by the corporations.

In addition to his work at CMU, Jim has played an active leadership role in the growth of the Pittsburgh entrepreneurship community over the last 20 years. He co-founded AlphaLab, a nationally ranked accelerator program (and one of the first accelerators in the U.S.) and subsequently helped launch AlphaLab Gear, AlphaLab Health and the Robotics Factory with corporate and industry partners. Jim also led initial investments in more than 200 pre-seed and seed stage companies for Innovation Works, and guided some of Pittsburgh’s fastest-growing tech companies, resulting in several billion dollars of exit values and additional investment.

Prior to moving to Pittsburgh, Jim led product management at multiple Silicon Valley-based companies, both venture-backed and Fortune 500. As a management consultant, Jim advised consumer-oriented companies on strategic planning and revenue growth strategies. Jim holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts, in Economics and a Master of Business Administration, all from Stanford University.