Clay Phillips

Clay Phillips is the Mobility Technology Lead for the Michigan SBDC. He has deep practical experience in open innovation, business development, strategy, and alliance management. From 2014 – 2018 he was an independent innovation and growth strategy advisor for startups, large companies, and non-profits. He served as an adjunct instructor for the U of M’s NSF Innovation Corps node, and as a mentor for Techstars, Plug and Play and GAMIC mobility tech startup programs.

Prior to 2014 he was an executive at General Motors where he held leadership positions in planning, corporate and advanced technology strategy, alliance management and innovation commercialization. He was a founding member and VP of GM’s corporate venture capital arm, GM Ventures, and led commercialization due diligence for the R&D Center’s internal startup program. Earlier in his career he managed international product and portfolio planning and new business development initiatives.

For the Michigan SBDC, he concentrates on the following:

• Automotive and mobility industry structure, behavior, and trends
• Lean Startup methodology with an emphasis on best practices for ecosystem mapping, customer discovery, value proposition formulation, business model development and stress-testing
• Pitch deck review and critiques
• Navigating the Michigan mobility-tech startup support ecosystem 

Clay holds a BA from Trinity College and an MBA from Columbia University. In between degrees he served as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy. For fun, he is an amateur musician and composer who plays guitar in a rock cover band, the Patio Heroes.