Vijay Kamineni is Co-Founder of Innovation Engine. He has a proven track record as an innovative, antifragile business problem solver across industries, with a career that has spanned startups, information technology, manufacturing, and economic development/innovation ecosystem initiatives.. His experience spans engineering, business modeling, and implementing Lean Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and Agile principles across organizations. 

With a career spanning the U.S., India, the Philippines, and Malaysia, Kamineni brings global perspectives and a strong command of systems thinking to the problems he’s solving. Kamineni was a corporate representative on Kentucky’s team that became the first U.S. state or region of a state to complete the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, leading to the formation of the nonprofit AccelerateKY, for which he was the founding board president. This led to the launch of the Metals Innovation Initiative, a 501(c)(3) with a mission to bring Kentucky together to make the state the destination for metals innovation. As the founding CEO for the organization, Kamineni won the KY Inno Fire Award in the CEO category from Louisville Business First in 2024. His work has been featured in many venues, including by MIT REAP and the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of the NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines program and by the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development and the Kentucky Association for Economic Development in their 2024 Collaborative Blueprint.

As Chief Innovation and Technology Leader at Logan Aluminum, Kamineni’s responsibilities included the organization’s technology strategy and management of the organization’s innovation and technology portfolio, including overall budget and value creation. He also led the Innovation & Technology Council, a cross-functional team of process engineers, automation specialists, domain experts, cybersecurity professionals, and IT members in digital transformation. Previous work included helping Malaysian IT company Basis Bay expand into a new market with the opening of a Country Office in the Philippines and bootstrapping Integrated Quality Management Services in India, which included acting as director for the Hyderabad section of the World Quality Congress in 1996 and which culminated in diversifying the consulting company into information technology and exiting through an IPO in the late 1990s.

Kamineni holds a Master of Business Administration focused on Global Strategic Business, with a minor in Innovation, from Temple University and a Mechanical Engineering degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India.