Ikhlaq Sidhu

Bio

Ikhlaq Sidhu is a Venture Partner with Xfund. He is the faculty director and founder of UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. He is the recipient of UC Berkeley’s IEOR Emerging Area Professor Award. Ikhlaq teaches, advises, and manages people to enable impactful and relevant innovation. The holder of over 60 patents, and as founder of the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, Ikhlaq has launched many spin-off programs that have collectively made UC Berkeley one of the nation’s foremost centers of entrepreneurship and innovation. With Ken Singer, he co-created the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship (for students) and the Berkeley Method of Innovation Leadership (for companies). Both of these frameworks add concepts of social psychology, mindset, and journey to the traditional steps of innovation. The spin-offs from his work at Berkeley include the GVL in 2008, the Fung Institute in 2009, the Engineering Leadership Professional Program in 2011, SkyDeck in 2012, the Innovation Collider in 2015, and Data-X in 2016. Sidhu serves on the Faculty Committee for Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley; on the Board of Trustees of the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar; as a Fellow of the Applied Innovation Institute; and on the Faculty Director’s Council at Jacob’s Institute of Design at UC Berkeley. Ikhlaq received his B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University.