Hyderabad, Telangana, India
Most innovation functions follow the same playbook: appoint a Head of Innovation, run a hackathon, print some t-shirts, and call it transformation. I've spent 19 years trying to do something more durable than that. At T-Hub, I worked alongside 1,100+ startups and got a close look at what actually separates the ones that scale from the ones that stall. I helped 150 of them get through the hard middle — past the pitch, into real enterprise contracts — while simultaneously advising 50 corporations on what it genuinely takes to build an innovation function that doesn't die after the first leadership change. That dual view, sitting between founders and large organisations, shaped how I think about all of this. At Dell, I built the India Innovation Forum and ran programs like AI Academy and FuturisTech. The goal was never the event itself. It was building the habits and language around innovation that stuck after the program wrapped. 300+ global participants in year one; a 25% jump in patent submissions. More importantly, people kept showing up. At Advance Auto Parts, I set up an Innovation Centre of Excellence within a GCC, which has its own particular friction. The gap between what HQ imagines and what a GCC can actually deliver is real. Closing it, through AI strategy, structured experimentation, and working closely with business units rather than alongside them, became the core of the job. I'm now at a point in my career where I'm thinking seriously about geography —the UAE and Singapore specifically—and the kinds of organisations where the intersection of AI transformation, venture-building, and ecosystem thinking is a real priority, not a side project.
- Set up the Innovation Centre of Excellence from the ground up. Defined the mandate, built the team structure, and put in place the governance that let it operate across business units without needing sign-off on everything. Worked with commercial teams to identify where AI could create real impact, not just demo well. One customer engagement initiative contributed to an 18% sales increase in Q1 — the kind of result that makes future budgets easier to have. - Rebuilt how the innovation budget was allocated. Moved away from activity-based spending — events, workshops, pilots that never went anywhere — toward outcome-linked investments. Freed up 20% of resources in the process. - Tripled the number of innovation initiatives running across the organisation through a structured experimentation model—more bets, smaller, faster, with clearer kill criteria. - Built the company's Generative AI governance framework. Practical guardrails, not theoretical ones — designed so teams could actually use the tools instead of waiting indefinitely for blanket approval. - Delivered a 25% improvement in customer satisfaction metrics through targeted solution launches built on innovation sprint outputs.
- Created and ran the India Innovation Forum — a cross-team program that increased active participation in innovation-related work by 40%. In a company of Dell's size, getting people to opt in is harder than it looks. - Built FuturisTech, a thought leadership series designed to travel beyond the internal audience. It attracted 300+ participants globally in its first year. - Sourced and evaluated startups for Dell Technologies Capital, building a pipeline of investment-ready companies aligned to Dell's strategic priorities in AI, cloud, and edge computing. - Led end-to-end deal evaluation — from first meeting through technical and commercial diligence — working closely with business units to stress-test fit before anything went to the investment committee. - Supported portfolio companies post-investment, connecting them into Dell's ecosystem for co-sell opportunities, go-to-market partnerships, and product integration pilots. - Acted as the bridge between the CVC team and internal business stakeholders - Ran a patent month initiative that resulted in a 25% jump in submissions. Less about the patents themselves and more about shifting how engineers thought about ownership of ideas they were already having. - Built AI Academy — a peer community of 200+ people inside Dell focused on practical AI and ML applications. Not a training module with a completion certificate. An ongoing network that kept running after I left.
- Managed a portfolio of 1,100+ startups across deep tech, SaaS, fintech, and social impact — every stage, from first idea to Series A and beyond. - Designed and ran corporate-startup accelerators with Intel, Meta, and other Fortune 500 companies, connecting real enterprise problems with startups that had solutions worth testing. Corporate engagement in these programs went up 30%. Raised a cumulative $100M USD for various startups. - Took 150 startups through the difficult scaling phase — the stretch between a working product and a repeatable business. Mostly that meant helping them navigate enterprise procurement, not pitching. - Advised 50+ corporations on building or sharpening their innovation approach — usually after they'd already tried the hackathon route once and realised it didn't move much. - Partnered with MeitY and government bodies on technology adoption programs that reached businesses that wouldn't typically have had access to those kinds of resources.
- Led 10+ ERP implementations across multiple sectors in different geographies, more than 10 different countries. The technical work was straightforward; the real job was understanding the client's actual business before touching the system. - Built RFPs specific enough to be genuinely useful — which turned out to be rarer than expected, and contributed to a 40% improvement in successful project bids during my time there. - Assessed emerging technologies against client needs and turned that into adoption roadmaps, not slide decks. Average operational efficiency improvement across engagements: 20%. - Delivered customised ERP solutions in collaboration with cross-functional teams, improving client satisfaction ratings by 15% post-implementation.
- Led an Oracle Apps implementation for GE Power and Water — a large, complex engagement that required mapping intricate business processes before writing a single configuration. - Led ERP implementation and support project for one of Australia's largest general insurance and financial services corporations. - Worked directly with stakeholders to gather requirements that reflected how the business actually ran, not just what the process documentation said. That distinction shortened timelines and significantly reduced rework. - Trained teams on new systems in a way that stuck — support queries dropped sharply in the months after go-live.