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Australian Professor Craig Mudge returned to his home country to establish the new Macquarie Institute for Innovation at Macquarie University after ten years living in Silicon Valley.

Over there he led the legendary Xerox PARC computer science lab, the source of many technologies that are commonplace today, such as the laser printer, the Ethernet, and the point-and-click windows interface. In the mid-nineties he nurtured the next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6, and other PARC innovations.

Today he operates Pacific Challenge, a strategy consultancy working with both startups and established firms – on entrepreneurial marketing, product planning, disruptive innovation, and technology management – as a board member or advisor. Clients have included Citibank in New York, Visa in San Francisco, Elders in Adelaide, AMP in Sydney, Jade in New Zealand, and ICM Agribusiness in Melbourne, CommerceNet, and AT&T Labs in the U.S. as well as over seventy startups through his work with venture firms.

Acquisitions of spinoffs and licensing deals from his labs total $500 million. He was a computer designer at DEC (now HP) in Boston and founded and led micro-chip research at CSIRO. He co-authored Computer Engineering with Gordon Bell, has published over sixty papers, and holds six patents. He has held faculty positions in Computer Science at Caltech, Carnegie Mellon University, and Flinders University. Mudge holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an undergraduate degree in mathematics, statistics, and economics from the ANU. His formal management education occurred at the AGSM and Harvard Business School.

As the CEO of Austek Microsystems, a technology company he founded on a breakthrough design technology developed at CSIRO.  He raised $US 6.7 million to found the company and grew it to $24 million in revenues and profitability from logic chips including the world’s first single-chip cache and signal processing chips.In 2006 the new Macquarie Institute for Innovation gave its first classes in entrepreneurship and the management on innovation across life sciences, computer technology, and the social economy. It is building a leadership position in entrepreneurship education in the Asia Pacific region, through its strong links in the U.S. and its mantra of being practical, international, and connected.