Speakers

Lauren Bigelow

Dr. Lauren Bigelow is the Executive Director of 20Fathoms. She is a senior executive and serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience leading innovative companies and initiatives. She has assisted privately held startup technology, energy, cleantech, IT, and fintech companies from the inception through the growth stage of their business. From 2010 onwards, and prior to 20Fathoms, Lauren was the CEO of the Growth Capital Network (GCN), a Michigan based firm that provides strategy, analytic, and impact evaluation services to the corporate, foundation, and non-profit community. Prior to GCN and before its ‘09 acquisition by Bloomberg, Lauren was the North American Commercial Director for New Energy Finance, the leading independent provider of information and research to investors in the clean energy markets. From early 2004 – 2008, she was the Managing Director of the Cleantech Group where she oversaw the firm’s technology and entrepreneur pipelines.

Lauren is a strategy creator and a builder – of large initiatives, collaborative platforms, and industry communities. As the managing director of the Cleantech Group, she was instrumental in creating “Cleantech” as an investment thesis and building the venture and banking community. One key accomplishment was having PWC add cleantech as an investment category to MoneyTree.

Lauren created and ran Accelerate Michigan, the first $1,000,000 innovation competition, taking it from a simple concept to six years and $7.7M of funding. She created and managed the multi-stakeholder program with 38 local and state-level economic development partners (11 corporations; UM, MSU, Michigan Tech, and WSU; 14 Michigan-based startup tech accelerators, MichBio, MMA, etc.) She recruited North American venture and angel investors, as well as seed and A stage companies in eight industry verticals. Presenting companies have raised $1B+ and created 2000+ jobs.

Other projects include the program administration and curriculum for the Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization (MTRAC) program that engaged UM, MSU, Michigan Tech, and WSU to streamline their technology transfer. And, the creation and execution of the Michigan Green Tech Entrepreneur Academy MI-GTEA a 4 day offsite to teach Midwest university and federal lab scientists to commercialize technology.

Lauren is on the finance faculty at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. She received her BA in Economics from the University of Michigan and her MA and PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University.