This week marks a changing of the guard for two key entrepreneurship programs at the University of Michigan.
The Ross School of Business announced that Stewart Thornhill will replace the retiring Tom Kinnear as executive director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, one of the oldest and highest ranked university entrepreneurial programs in the country. Kinnear has served as executive director since the program’s inception in 1999.
Thornhill comes from the Ivey Business School at Western University in Ontario, and will officially take his post on September 1. Thornhill’s background also includes stints at the Universidad de San Andreas, Buenos Aires; Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany; the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in France; and the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto.
Also getting new leadership this week is U-M’s Center for Entrepreneurship at the College of Engineering. Outgoing executive director Doug Neal left to start the Michigan eLab venture capital firm. Replacing him is Tom Frank, who served as CEO of Real Networks in the 1990s. More recently, Frank has had various leadership positions at White Dog Media, Pink Zulu Labs, Vobile, the Hollywood Radio & Television Society, the National Association of Television Executives, and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Frank, who is relocating to Michigan from the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a press release that he hopes to expand the hands-on aspects of the entrepreneurship program by “accelerating web-based learning and team-teaching between real-world entrepreneurs and U-M faculty.”
