Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program Team

• Jay A. Smith, Program Director
• Dr. David F. Barbe, Faculty Director

Jay A. Smith, MBA

Jay Smith is the inaugural Director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program. He leads the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program, managing both its operational aspects as well as teaching and mentoring the living-learning student community members. As a Lecturer with Mtech, Mr. Smith designs and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in entrepreneurship and innovation, with a special focus on creativity and international business.
 
Mr. Smith joined the University of Maryland in 2010 after serving for five years as Associate Professor of the Inamori Academy of Kagoshima (National) University in southern Japan. At Kagoshima University, he developed and taught courses in venture business, entrepreneurship, business communications, and American business & culture in a program endowed by university alumnus and leading Japanese entrepreneur Kazuo Inamori, founder of Kyocera Corporation, telecommunications firm DDI (now KDDI), and the Inamori Foundation, grantors of the Kyoto Prizes. Utilizing business presentations developed in his courses, his students have won both local and regional business plan competitions and have been top finalists in national student and open competitions.
 
Prior to entering academia, Mr. Smith worked for 14 years as a management consultant, investment banker and venture entrepreneur in New York, San Francisco and Tokyo. As a consultant, he successfully completed market development, operations, acquisition and strategy assignments in the U.S., Japan, Russia and Europe for major technology and industrial companies. As an investment banker with Jefferies & Company, he helped raise over $400 million for technology and media businesses, and evaluated numerous venture investment opportunities for the firm. In Tokyo during the 1990s, he co-founded a multi-million dollar technology, creative services, and media business, with a diverse multinational staff and clients including the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, Citibank, Coca-Cola, Compaq, IBM, and Motorola, and Japanese partners including an NTT subsidiary and Japan Telecom.
 
Mr. Smith holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he focused on entrepreneurship and the management of technology. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, with High Honors and a dual major in Economics and Physics, from Rutgers University.

Dr. David F. Barbe

Dr. David F. Barbe is Executive Director of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech). He received B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from West Virginia University in 1962 and 1964, respectively. In 1969 he received the Ph.D. degree from The Johns Hopkins University in Electrical Engineering.

After positions at Westinghouse, the Naval Research Laboratory and the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, he joined the University of Maryland in 1985 where he is currently Executive Director of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Barbe was awarded the rank of Fellow of the IEEE in 1978 for his pioneering work on charge coupled device imagers, now used in digital cameras, camcorders, fax machines and numerous defense and medical applications. He has published and presented over 100 technical papers in the area of electronics and electro-optics and was an IEEE Electron Devices Society National Lecturer in 1988. His more recent publications are in the field of technology entrepreneurship and innovation. He was chairman of the American Society of Engineering Education Entrepreneurship Division from 2005 to 2006.

The Hinman CEOs Program, for which he is the Faculty Director, received the Stanford University Innovative Entrepreneurship Educators Award in 2002, and Dr. Barbe received the American Society of Engineering Education Outstanding Entrepreneurship Educators Award in 2003. He was also awarded the Olympus Lifetime of Educational Innovation Award in 2008.