Dr Manjula Dissanayake

Manjula Dissanayake is the Academic Director – ThincLab & Entrepreneurship Programs at the Adelaide Business School of the University of Adelaide.

He specialises in entrepreneurial learning taking a technology-centric approach to provide a flexible and personalised learning experience.

He has also designed and facilitated many business accelerator/pre-accelerator programs including eChallenge program the longest-running pre-accelerator program in South Australia and Business Model Innovation program for business leaders in South Australia and Victoria. Manjula is also a certified Personal Initiative coach, the only empirically proven program to result in 30% profit growth in two years by practising business leaders.

Prior to the University of Adelaide, Manjula was a facilitator for the Accelerating Information Technology Initiative (AITI) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Manjula is a co-founder of highly successful technology start-up companies in Silicon Valley raising multi-million dollars, one of which was acquired by Symbol Technologies, which subsequently got acquired by Motorola (now a Google Company) in 2002. Manjula has worked on innovative projects for leading clients including Macy’s, Kohls, Verifone and JPMC in the USA and retail, banking and government sectors across more than 15 countries. He also has over 10 US patents in the technology space and published research papers and book chapters on entrepreneurial learning within business accelerators and business model innovation.