Mukesh Patel is a serial entrepreneur and advisor with experience in private equity, angel investments, innovation, business law, and education. Mukesh has founded numerous ventures, secured significant capital (equity and debt), and worked with more than 100 investor partners. He has been featured in national media, and Entrepreneur.com recently named him one of “The Hot 30 Movers and Shakers of New York City’s Startup Scene.”
Mukesh is the founder and CEO of JuiceTank, NJ’s largest co-working space and incubator for tech-startups and VX, an innovative venture accelerator that provides advisory-consulting to corporations, non-profits, startups and emerging growth ventures in the areas of innovation, scale, ideation, creativity, corporate culture, employee engagement, new product development, business models, mindsets, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, power networking, and strategic leadership. He has an experienced team and the firm is powered by strategic partnerships attracting national and international interest.
As an award-winning Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers University Business School, he teaches strategy and has designed a ground-breaking, experiential and inter-disciplinary course titled “ICE”(Innovation, Creativity & Entrepreneurship). He also designed and teaches D3: Digital Transformation, Disruption & Design-Thinking for the Executive MBA program. He is Lead Faculty for Executive Education where he designed and teaches with an experienced faculty team a new course, “Innovation for Corporate Enterprise” to corporate executives and managers. As the inaugural Director of Innovation at the Honors College he designed and leads the Innovation Lab for Social Impact and works with the top 1% of the ideas and teams to launch new social enterprises. He will be engaging with a team of national corporate sponsors and leading experts to provide the Innovation Fellows mentorship and allocation of seed funding to help them transform their ideas into real-life social innovation ventures. He is also the Director of Development and Co-Ad Professor for the new Entrepreneurship Law Clinic at Rutgers Law School, providing valuable legal resources to the business community through a collaborative platform. He also teaches Women & Business at the Global Village.
On the international speaking circuit, he has presented keynotes on entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial insights as well as innovative, creative and disruptive design-thinking, including at TEDx, Google Campus in Seoul, Korea, a conference sponsored by the US Embassy, and was featured at an event at the United Nations. He has guest lectured at Kaist University in Seoul, Korea and at several universities in India as well as in the U.S. including New York and Washington D.C. He has recently been invited to speak and advise universities and high schools in India, China, Africa, Ireland and Mexico. He is active in the national Conference for Innovation in Business School Education involving more than 30 top universities across the U.S. He is on the Executive Board and VP of NJ Business Innovation Network and Co-Chair of its Innovation Committee. Mukesh is the inaugural recipient of the Rutgers Alumni Entrepreneurship Award presented at the Global Entrepreneurship Conference, the Dean’s Meritorious Award for Excellence in Teaching and Service, and was recently named Best Entrepreneurship Professor by the Rutgers Business Governing Association and Business Person of the Year by the Future Business Leaders Association.
Mukesh has multi-disciplinary degrees: JurisDoctor from Fordham Law School, B.A. in Economics & Statistics from Rutgers (Summa Cum Laude, Henry Rutgers Scholar, Cap & Skull), with a secondary in Cinematic Arts.
Mukesh provides advisory and coaching to executives, entrepreneurs, innovators, creative types, students, corporations, non-profits, and educational institutions. He runs Think-Tanks where he assembles and serves on expert advisory boards.