From 2004 to 2008, Gary also served as Managing Director and VC-in-Residence for the University of Minnesota’s innovative Carlson Ventures Enterprise (CVE); a full-time MBA program at the Carlson School of Management. During that tenure, he was a strategic advisor to the University’s Office of the Vice-President for Research (OVPR) during the fundamental redesign of its Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC).

In 2007, Gary created and launched a ground-breaking multidisciplinary collaborative framework with the University called Innovation by Design (IBD) to foster market-driven collaboration among rising-star graduate students, distinguished faculty, global industrial partners and venture investors.

During the three-year campus-wide pilot, the IBD initiative focused on tackling innovative, market-driven renewable energy solutions that are environmentally sustainable and commercially viable.

In the pilot’s final year, which ended in August 2009, Gary acted as the University’s Director for Collaborative Innovation within the OVPR. In this role, Gary crafted a rollout strategy for an ‘industrial-strength’ version of the IBD model referred to as a CoLAB.

In addition, Gary studied best-practices at the nation’s leading research universities, including a three-month appointment as a Visiting Scholar at the prestigious California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications (CALIT2) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).