Chris Galvin

Chris Galvin has a passion for innovation and, as a business leader, sought continuous renewal in his organizations. Chris currently heads his own hi-tech venture capital fund with his two sons, David and William. One of Chris’s most spectacular venture successes was as the lead venture investor and board chair of Cleversafe, a startup company incubated at Illinois Tech and later successfully sold to IBM. Before Cleversafe, Chris co-founded Harrison Street Real Estate Capital with his brother and Illinois Tech alumnus Mike Galvin and close family friend Chris Merrill. Prior to founding this business, Chris served as the chair and CEO of Motorola, Inc., where he worked for over 36 years in various roles, from his first summer job in a factory tools crib to a C-suite for his last seven years with the company. While CEO of Motorola, Chris Galvin was particularly proud of the team that he attracted and led, which: (1) invented the first cable modem; (2) integrated the first hardware and software for turn-by-turn GPS electronic map navigation in a car; (3) originated the technologies that enabled and spawned the founding of Nextel Communications, which was sold to Sprint a decade later for $35 billion; and (4) created Motorola’s hit cell phone models, the StarTAC and RAZR, among others. Chris advanced Motorola’s tradition of creating not just new products but whole new industries approximately every fifteen years. The Global Business Network ranked the turnaround of Motorola by Chris’ team as one of the top five largest and most successful high technology company turnarounds, in the same class with the other esteemed turnarounds of that era such as IBM, HP, Xerox, and Apple. In his role as chair of the Robert W. Galvin Foundation, Chris authorized the transformational donations to Illinois Tech which launched the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation.