Jon Glass

Executive Director, Defense Industrial Base Initiative (DIBI)

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Jonathan (Jon) Glass is the Executive Director of the Defense Industrial Base Initiative (DIBI), which he helped launch in early 2025 with a mission of catalyzing public-private partnerships and engaging the whole of society to ensure a robust, resilient and dynamic defense industrial base for our nation and our allies. He brings over twenty years of executive leadership experience in business development, venture capital and private equity investing, strategic partnerships, technology commercialization, new business creation and IP licensing.

Prior to joining Northeastern, Jon served as the Deputy Director for Commercialization at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the United States’ disruptive energy technology funding arm. In this role, he led a team of 20 technology commercialization professionals to oversee the transition and scaling of transformative new energy technologies out of laboratories and into markets.

From 2018 to 2022, Jon was the Director of Venture Accelerations at National Grid Partners, the strategic venture capital investment arm of National Grid plc, one of the world’s largest investor-owned utilities. In this role, Jon oversaw the NextGrid Alliance, a global network of over 80 power utilities that National Grid launched to foster industry-wide innovation and collaboration to accelerate the energy transition. He also worked closely with National Grid Partners’ portfolio of over 40 energy technology startups to identify and execute commercial opportunities with National Grid’s utility businesses in the United States and United Kingdom.

Before National Grid, Jon served as a leader at several technology start-up companies. He was the chief commercial officer at Vener8 Technologies, where he structured new corporate partnerships, identified candidate technologies for licensing from each partner, and developed new businesses around licensed technologies. He also co-founded and led Wise Labs, an open innovation platform company that connected world-class scientists and engineers to businesses seeking to scale technology innovations and to leverage deep technical expertise.

From 1998 to 2014, Jon served in multiple executive roles at General Electric. He was the business development leader at GE Licensing, GE’s intellectual property monetization arm; managing director at GE Equity, GE’s venture capital and private equity investment arm; and managing director for new business creation at GE Commercial Finance, GE’s leveraged lending business. In these roles, Jon directly structured and executed over $500 million in strategic investments, joint ventures and acquisitions.

Jon received an MBA, with honors, from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an AB, magna cum laude, from Harvard College. He is a co-inventor on two issued US patents and a former member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).