Nagesh Rao, Small Business Administration

Nagesh Rao currently serves as Chief Technologist with the US Small Business Administration’s Office of Investment & Innovation. His portfolio of work includes the SBIR/STTR program and coordination of the Fueling Small Business Innovation Interagency Policy Committee for the White House’s Lab to Market Commercialization Agenda.

He is a practicing technologist and commercialization strategist working at the intersection of applied science, law, business, and public policy from both domestic and international perspectives with over 10+ years of successful experience. Nagesh has been afforded the privilege to work with top-tier cutting edge organizations such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Office of Technology Commercialization, The National Academies (NAS, NAE, IOM & NRC), US Department of Commerce (USPTO, EDA, & OIE), LAUNCH, CleanTech Los Angeles, Global Access in Action, NCET2, Innovation Endeavors, Planet Labs, Ecovative Design, Publicbeat, Peek, Stiefel Family Foundation, and most recently Virginia Tech’s Applied Research Corporation.

Nagesh Rao played an instrumental role in the creation and execution of 5 major interagency policy committee reports regarding the SBIR/STTR program on behalf of the White House-OSTP and SBA for US Congress, as well currently co-leading the re-vamped build out of the www.sbir.gov platform that centralizes the programmatic efforts of the 11 participating federal agencies. Nagesh has been afforded the privilege to work with top-tier cutting edge organizations such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Office of Technology Commercialization,

Within those various organizations Nagesh has worked in a myriad of roles including: patent examination, investment diligence, intellectual property portfolio curation, startup company formation and scale up, fundraising, expert advisory assessments, crafting of policy reports and much more. As well through his work he has played a significant role in developing the following programmatic endeavors: i6 Green, FLoW, Patents for Humanity, VT-ARC Additive Manufacturing Grand Challenge, and AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador Program.

Furthermore he composes and presents intellectual musings which have been featured via WAMC-NPR, TechCrunch, The Scientist, Triple Pundit, MIT XPrize Lab, UC Berkeley, RPI, Stanford, Cleantech Open at Xerox-parc, NCET2, BPIA, The National SBIR Conference, Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, The National Academies, Next Gov Prime 2020, and PwC’s CleanTech Revolution at the LA Autoshow.