Dan Goodman

Dan Goodman is a serial entrepreneur, consultant, advisor and educator who has founded or co-founded 14 companies and three non-profit organizations since 1970. He has held leadership roles in several fields including industrial product development, technology commercialization, renewable energy, venture capital, and organizational development.

Dan is the CEO of Relativity Sciences, Inc., a culture-change consulting and training firm he founded in 2008, focusing on intrapreneurship, innovation, and customer intimacy for Fortune 500 companies and government organizations. He has been an advisor and consultant to well over one hundred organizations, from startups to venture capital firms to Fortune 100’s on entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship, strategy, commercialization, and culture change, and is a frequent lecturer and trainer on these topics.

Dan serves as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) and Senior Fellow for Executive Development at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. For six years he was the EiR for the university’s Division of Research, where he advised senior university leadership on innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization strategies. Prior to that he was the EiR Emeritus and Technology Commercialization Fellow at the Smith School, where he co-taught MBA entrepreneurship classes. Dan also served as Research Development Lead for the Lockheed Martin strategic relationship, the university’s largest corporate partnership, where he developed and managed research collaborations in medical informatics, genomics, secure wireless communications, cyber-psychology, and robotics. He is an alumnus and board member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UMD’s Clark School of Engineering. From 2002 to 2004, Dan was the EiR at the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization, where he developed licensing deals for the university’s intellectual property portfolio.

Among his roles in companies he has founded, Dan was Chairman and Managing Director of Zernike USA, the U.S. arm of Zernike Group, a Dutch venture capital and science park management firm; President and CEO of The Silverthorn Group, a product development firm specializing in building automation, transportation, medical and energy systems; CEO of Odexia, a university spinout company commercializing a novel micro-electromechanical sensor (MEMS) for national security applications; and Partner and chief architect of Brainchild Maryland, the State of Maryland’s public-private partnership to accelerate the creation of spinout companies from the intellectual property in the State’s university and federal lab systems, funded by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.

Dan was appointed by the Governor of Maryland to the board of directors of the State’s clean energy economic development authority, where he served as vice chairman, treasurer and chairman of the finance committee. He chaired Maryland’s first clean energy business incubator, and has been a board director or advisory board member on over a dozen other boards of corporations, non-profits, venture capital firms and business incubators, including the Chesapeake Innovation Center, the nation’s first homeland security business incubator (sponsored by the National Security Agency).

Dan is co-authoring the upcoming book Triumphant Teams, a best-practices guide for corporate R&D professionals collaborating with academic researchers, together with Jim Severson, former President of the Cornell Research Foundation and AUTM (The Association of University Technology Managers).