Thomas J. Crotty ’80
Senior Advisor, Battery Ventures
Bryan Ritchie
Associate Provost And Vice President For Innovation, IDEA Center, University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame’s Startup & Commercialization Ecosystem
March 2019
Goodwin, Boston Seaport
Tom Crotty has spent the past 30 years in the venture capital industry, assisting entrepreneurs in the building of startup companies. Having joined Battery in 1989, Tom spent fifteen years as a primary investor at the firm followed by twelve years as Managing Partner responsible for
managing all investment and operational aspects of the partnership. As an investor, he has
served as a board member for dozens of companies in the communications, software and
e-commerce sectors. Prior to joining Battery, Tom began his venture capital career at Abacus
Ventures and entered the technology industry in 1980, holding positions with IBM’s mainframe
and minicomputer divisions.
Having moved to Senior Advisor status at Battery during 2012, Tom is now an active angel
investor investing for his personal account, with a portfolio of early stage investments within the technology and consumer products industries. Tom was actively involved in promoting and lobbying on behalf of the venture capital industry having served on the Board and Executive Committee of the National Venture Capital Association. He also served on the Small Company IPO Task Force which examined and recommend to the U.S. Treasury and SEC changes to existing securities regulations with the goal of increasing access to the public securities markets for small business. A number of the task force’s recommendations were incorporated into the JOBS Act legislation passed by Congress in April of 2012.
Active in the non-profit world, Tom is a member of the board of trustees at his alma mater, The
University of Notre Dame. He is Board Chair at Grassroot Soccer, a leading non-profit working
to improve adolescent health in Africa. Closer to home, he is a board member of the Foundation for MetroWest serving the communities in the western suburbs of Boston, and founded the Southborough Community Fund working to support the community in which he lives. Tom received a BA in Business from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA in Finance
from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Bryan Ritchie is Notre Dame’s first vice president and associate provost for innovation
Leading the University’s IDEA (Innovation, De-risking, and Enterprise Acceleration)
Center, he works closely with deans, alumni, faculty, and students to promote a culture
of innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization.
Ritchie’s major responsibilities as head of the IDEA Center include directing the
University’s commercialization enterprise, Innovation Park at Notre Dame, a commercial
accelerator designed to help Notre Dame researchers and others bring their discoveries
to market, and cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship education. With extensive
experience in both industry and the academy, Ritchie came to Notre Dame from the
venture capital firm GrowthSPORT. As president and CEO, he guided its investing
activities, focusing primarily on seed-stage technology companies. Ritchie has formed
multiple information technology companies of his own during his career and also held
management positions with Century Software, Dayna Communications, IBM, Novell,
IOMEGA, Megahertz, and 3Com. He has consulted for Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Ericsson,
Seagate, Verizon, Givaudan, and over 100 other companies.
Prior to co-founding GrowthSPORT, Ritchie spent four years directing technology
commercialization at the University of Utah, first as associate vice president for
technology venture development and then as associate vice president for research. He
oversaw more than 60 new startups, more than $700 million in investment and grants,
an average of 90 licenses per year, and 90+ patents per year.
Ritchie is a graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and holds an M.B.A. from
Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in political economy from Emory University. As a
member of the faculty at Michigan State University, he rose from assistant to associate
to full professor of political economy and was part of the core faculty of the Asian
Studies Center. In addition, he served as director or co-director of two student
entrepreneurship programs and as associate director for external strategy of the MSU
BioEconomy Network, which coordinates the university’s initiatives to promote
Michigan’s bioeconomy through research, policy and economic analysis, education,
corporate and government collaborations, and commercialization.
Fluent in Thai and conversant in several other Asian languages, Ritchie is the author of
two books: Systemic Vulnerability and Sustainable Economic Growth: Skills and
Upgrading in Southeast Asia and, with MSU’s Lindon Robison, Relationship Economics:
The Social Capital Paradigm and its Application to Business, Politics, and Other
Transactions.