Neil Kane, a leading authority on technology commercialization and innovation, is the president and founder of Illinois Partners Executive Services, LLC. Most recently he was the CEO of Advanced Diamond Technologies, Inc., a company he co-founded in 2003 by licensing technology from Argonne National Laboratory (U.S. Dept. of Energy). Mr. Kane is the former co-Executive Director of the Illinois Technology Enterprise Center at Argonne and was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Research Park at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Northern Illinois University. In these roles he was founding CEO of several startup companies based on university or federal laboratory research in areas such as nanotechnology, advanced materials, software, renewable energy and printed electronics. He has closed multiple rounds of venture capital from investors worldwide and has secured numerous SBIR/STTR and other government contracts and awards.

Earlier he was Regional Business Development Manager for Microsoft Corporation. In this role he identified, negotiated and closed a $25 million equity investment. At IBM he was the liaison to Andersen Consulting (later Accenture) and helped create the strategic business alliance that became the model for the IT industry. In this capacity he earned membership into IBM’s Golden Circle and received a President’s Award. He was a member of the 100% Club several times. He began his career as a manufacturing engineer in IBM’s San Jose, California facility where he designed robotic tooling for the automated manufacturing of disk drives.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (high honors) and a Masters of Business Administration from The University of Chicago. He attended graduate school at the Australian Graduate School of Management at The University of New South Wales in Sydney and did further graduate study in Japan on a scholarship from the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO). He was named a 2007 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and twice attended their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In 2007 he received recognition from the National Science Foundation for Outstanding Entrepreneurship and in 2009 was named a “Mover & Shaker” by Frost & Sullivan. In 2010 and 2012 Mr. Kane was an invited witness on the subject of technology transfer for the U.S. House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Research & Science Education. In 2011 he was asked by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn to serve on the Illinois Innovation Council. Also in 2011 he became a mentor for the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps. He is a contributor to Forbes.com on topics related to technology commercialization and entrepreneurial leadership.