New Ways | Anthony Warren

Early-Stage Navigation

Tony’s expertise focuses on the skills necessary to take an initial innovative concept to a company ready for professional financing. These skills include bootstrapping, intellectual property management, corporate partnering, networking, angel and seed-stage financing, business modeling, efficient virtual structures and assembling a management team,

International experience

Armed with a Ph.D in physics from the University of Birmingham, UK, Tony consulted in over 20 countries to companies at C-level on the management of innovation, cultural openness, and technology acquisition strategies. Moving next to the VC sector, he raised capital for an early-stage fund, before joining Adams Capital as a partner to undertake due diligence on deals for their $815mm fund. 

Tony spent 12 years at Penn State University building curricula and institutions to make the university rank as one of the leading schools worldwide for entrepreneurship education, now offered to over 80,000 students annually. Together with Prof. Jack Kaplan from Columbia University, he wrote a highly regarded book, now in its sixth edition, entitled “Patterns of Entrepreneurship Management”, which has been used at WU for several years.

New ways of teaching

While at PennState, Tony undertook research on novel pedagogies for entrepreneurship education. The methods, referred to as ‘problem-based learning (PBL)’ are focused on the student solving complex problems in order to develop the personal skills necessary to become a successful entrepreneur. It avoids the rather outdated method of teaching, in which students are lectured with prepared materials. In contrast, using PBL students must deal with risk, ambiguity, complexity and even failure. His team’s research earned best paper at the Academy of Management, and now is the foundation of many courses in entrepreneurship, including those at WU.

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