Former Millburn Local Leads Stevens Students To Competition Win

MILLBURN, NJ — A Hoboken college professor and former Millburn resident successfully guided a team of students to the grand prize in a virtual competition that tasked teams will growing real-world biological companies.

Gary Lynn, who is a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, entered a team of graduate students in the inaugural Global Scaling Challenge, which was hosted virtually by the University of New Mexico. The competition featured 17 teams of undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D level teams from the United States, India, Austria and England in a three-day challenge of scaling companies.

Lynn’s team captured three first-place prizes including the Grand Prize in late April, sharing $20,000 in prize money. Each student team was only given two weeks to research, prepare and present new ideas to differentiate and scale three small to medium-sized companies working in various biological areas, according to a news release.

Teams were provided 10 minutes on each competition day to present their growth strategies for each company to a panel of judges, which included the companies' leaders, other venture capitalists and experienced CEOs, followed by 10 minutes of questions from those executives about operational details, markets and strategy.

Lynn is one of three, tenured, full Professors in the School of Business at Stevens. He is cited as the most frequently published and referenced scholar in the field of Innovation Marketing, the release said. Lynn was selected by Business 2.0 Magazine as one of the nine leading management gurus in the world. He was named twice as one of the seven most prolific thought leaders in the field of Technology-Innovation Management by the International Association for the Management of Technology.

Dr. Lynn started, built and sold four companies. He was formerly Senior Managing Director and Chief Innovation Officer for Spencer Trask, a New York-based venture capital firm, that placed $1 billion in 130 start-ups – where he worked with a variety of CEOs and Boards.