As Senior Business Development Manager with the Purdue Research Foundation’s Office of Technology Commercialization (PRF-OTC), Dhananjay works with Purdue innovators to develop Intellectual Property (IP) and commercialization strategies to enable timely transfer of Purdue Intellectual Property (IP), primarily in the engineering and physical sciences areas. He is involved in assessing the technologies’ commercial viability, identifying potential licensing partners, developing business terms and legal contracts to enable technology transfer to licensees and in negotiating and executing commercial licensing agreements.

Prior to joining the OTC Dhananjay worked with Purdue’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Center providing leadership, client engagement, and project management for the center’s IN-MaC Technology Adoption program across the State of Indiana. Dhananjay has spent over 9 years at Cummins Inc. and his experience there spans a variety of roles: as Project Manager in Business Process Functional Excellence, Product Engineering Reliability Leader in Customer Engineering, Technical Leader in New Product Introduction and Senior Engineer in Product Tailoring. He has also worked in the automotive industry in Michigan managing new product launches for a Tier 1 supplier of automotive exterior products to the major automakers in Detroit.

Dhananjay has a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune, India; a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toledo, Ohio; and an MBA in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in Indianapolis.

• What is one invention that you just couldn’t live without? The World Wide Web and more specifically Google Search 🙂
• What time period do you think would be the most fun to live in and why? Sometime in the (hopefully near) future when time travel becomes a reality – wouldn’t it be cool to be able to go back in time and witness history being made!
• Pick three of the happiest moments thus far in your life.
  • The day I was born – couldn’t wait to get started with my first revolution around the sun!
  • The day my dad finally handed me the keys to his scooter
  • The day our son arrived – couldn’t wait to see him start his first revolution around the sun!!
• If someone promised you enough money to remodel/redecorate one room of your house, which room would that be?   Convert a part of my basement into a reading room – and then of course try to make time to go down there and read.