David Charron is Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley where he lectures on entrepreneurship.  He has been working in the field of technology commercialization and entrepreneurship since 1987 having held positions in technology licensing and commercialization with Xerox PARC, MIT and Stanford University.  In 1995, he co-founded Scientific Learning Corporation, a publicly-traded neuroscience company based on innovations from UCSF.  He has also started two other companies and consults to inventors, entrepreneurs and new ventures.  Mr. Charron has also worked with Technology Ventures Corporation, a non-profit organization, focused on commercialization of technologies emerging from the US national lab system through direct assistance to entrepreneurs and startups.  Mr. Charron is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Laboratory, a non-profit incubator with the goal of increasing entrepreneurial activity at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

At Haas, Mr. Charron teaches Entrepreneurship, Business Model Innovation in New Ventures, Case Studies in Entrepreneurship, Workshop for Startups and is faculty director for Life as an Entrepreneur.  He has also been a principal member of the faculty team for the Intel Curriculum project, teaching international faculty members how to teach entrepreneurship through a 2-day intensive Entrepreneurship Education:Theory to Practice seminar.  He has been invited to teach the Theory to Practice seminar 38 times in countries including Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Romania, Russia, Russia, Spain and Turkey.  He is faculty co-director with Jerry Engel on the two-week Technology Entrepreneurship Education: Global Faculty Colloquium and the Venture Capital Executive Program at Berkeley’s Center for Executive Education. He is Faculty Director on the UCSF/QB3 Global BioEntrepreneurship Program.  He has taught in many executive education courses at Berkeley focused on innovation, new venture development and corporate entrepreneurship.

Technologies that Mr. Charron has worked with include: thin-film semiconductors, MEMs, novel print media and systems, data compression (speech and video), secure content distribution, handwriting and speech recognition, software for assessing portfolio risk, CRM software, digital media and copyrights, medical diagnostics, medical imaging, large scale optimization, rapid prototyping, EDA software, text-to-speech, and others.  Startup companies that Mr. Charron has advised or been involved with:  Aurora Biofuels, Yardbarker, Silicon Clocks, World of Good, Adura Technologies, Risk Management Software, Boston Dynamics, Aware, Nanonexus, SpeechWorks, CommandCAD, Soligen.

Mr. Charron provides technology and startup assessments, along with providing ongoing advisory services.  He has negotiated and written technology licensing and joint ventures agreements, been involved with complex patent portfolio assessments, patent assertions and intellectual property strategies.  His experience bridges the domains of intellectual property development from research at academia and the corporation, through business instantiation and incubation, fund-raising and venture capital through customer development and growth of the corporation in competitive markets.

He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Haas School. 

MOT Course(s):

• WORKSHOP FOR STARTUPS

Haas School of Business Faculty Page