Doug Speight
Strategic Partnerships & Outreach Initiatives Manager
Doug Speight is Manager for Strategic Partnerships & Outreach Initiatives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he focuses on expanding research collaborations with universities, entrepreneurship initiatives and market-driven commercialization opportunities. In addition to holding past economic development appointments at North Carolina A&T State University (NC A&T), he has eight years of technology transfer and commercialization experience with both NC A&T and NASA and seven years of entrepreneurial experience.
Speight formerly served as the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Outreach & Economic Development at NC A&T where his duties included the management of Technology Transfer, Venture Development and Economic Development. Speight was an active leader in developing technology transfer strategy and economic development policy for the sixteen-campus University of North Carolina System through his appointment to the Office of the President’s Economic Transformation Council. Prior to his role as Assistant Vice Chancellor, he served as Director for Technology Transfer & Commercialization, during which time NC A&T’s intellectual property portfolio grew to five times its former size and contained technologies varying from structural health monitoring systems for aerospace applications to nutriceuticals. The OTT succeeded in licensing forty-four percent of its diverse portfolio to corporations across the US, Asia and Europe under his direction. Speight was also instrumental in launching four start-ups from NC A&T in biomedical diagnostics, medical devices, information technology and advanced materials, in addition to advising and mentoring over forty-one entrepreneurial companies. Speight has delivered talks on technology transfer strategy at the President’s Advisory Council on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
As a technology transfer consultant for NASA, he worked with Kennedy (Florida), Stennis (Mississippi) and Marshall (Alabama) Space Flight Centers to market and license technologies from each of their intellectual property portfolios. Speight has played critical roles in launching an early-stage angel investment fund in the Charlotte, NC region, in addition to founding and serving as Vice President and Principal Partner of a successful engineering design firm which serviced several Fortune 1000 manufacturing clients.
Speight holds a degree in Industrial Technology from North Carolina A&T State University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a member in the Association of University Technology Mangers (AUTM) and Licensing Executives Society (LES). Speight is active in the community, having served on multiple Boards of Directors including: Greensboro Chamber of Commerce, Action Greensboro, Piedmont Triad Partnership, Piedmont Triad Entrepreneurs Network and the United Way. His projects have been featured in BusinessWeek magazine, NC magazine, Black Issues in Higher Education and The Business Journal of the Triad, where he was presented its Top 40 Under 40 award.