Olivia Taliaferro is a fifth-year undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University who is originally from Portland, Oregon. She will graduate in May of 2018 with a BS in Chemical Engineering, as well as a BA in French. On campus, she has been a member of IMPROVment, CWRU's short form improv comedy troupe, for 5 years. This academic year she also served as president of the troupe. Olivia has previously studied abroad in Paris at Université Paris Diderot for a semester. She plans to use the skills she gained in Paris and through this course to succeed in global collaboration projects after she graduates. She has accepted a role as a Process Technology Engineer for Lubrizol next June, and hopes to serve an assignment abroad during her future career. In her free time, Olivia enjoys spending time with dogs, playing board games, and acting. She is very much looking forward to meeting everyone in Tanzania and getting to participate in this course!
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Lauren is a second-year MBA at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, focusing on Design and Innovation. She heads the WSOM Design Club and a the WSOM Design For America project team where she is working to on a social innovation in the eldercare space using human centered design methods. She also works with first-year Design students and on a number of Design and Innovation initiatives as the Design and Innovation Graduate Assistant. Lauren has had a passion for social entrepreneurship and innovation since college, where she engaged in servant leadership programming and conducted a community based research project. Fun fact: she got to meet Jessica Jackley, the founder of Kiva (a peer-to-peer micro-lending platform) back in 2012 at a conference on Social Entrepreneurship. We won't mention that being in the presence of this rockstar social entrepreneur made Lauren cry in public. It is a life goal of hers to one day meet the original social innovator, Muhammad Yunus. Assistance in this endeavor would be greatly appreciated. Between college and pursuing her MBA, Lauren became the part of the giant social innovation engine of Teach For America. She was a Spanish teacher in inner-city Chicago for her two years in the Corps, and then as an alum she continued teaching for two additional years. She now gets to put her teaching experience to use in her position as the VP of Academic Affairs of Weatherhead's Graduate Business Student Association. All of these experiences with social innovation led Lauren to human-centered design, which is what she works in today as a part of Goodyear's Customer Centered Innovation team. She also works with a national social innovation group called Social Venture Partners, offering capacity building consulting for Cleveland's most impactful non-profits. For fun, she likes to run, ski, and paint. She just completed her third marathon in November 2017! She hopes to re Michael Goldberg is an experienced venture capitalist and international business leader whose teaching is focused on the fields of entrepreneurship and early stage finance. Goldberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Innovation at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. With support from the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, Goldberg created a massive open online course (MOOC) called Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies, which has attracted over 135,000 students from 190 countries with subtitles in 16 languages (most on Coursera platform). Inc.com named Beyond Silicon Valley one of the top online classes that "will make you smarter and more interesting." Goldberg spoke about the impact of his MOOC at TEDxHeraklion in Crete (February 2015) and TEDxFulbright in Santa Monica (September 2015).
Goldberg co-founded the Bridge Investment Fund, a venture capital fund focused on investing in Israeli medical device companies that have synergies with the leading health care industries and institutions in Cleveland. Goldberg was the Director of International Business Development for America Online, responsible for structuring and negotiating international partnerships in Asia, including AOL’s joint venture with Lenovo to develop interactive services for the China market. Goldberg spent several years in South Africa working for the National Democratic Institute, designing and implementing voter education programs for South Africa’s historic first democratic election in 1994. Goldberg also worked for Microsoft and the International Management Group (IMG). Goldberg has deep experience teaching entrepreneurship in international markets. He was awarded Fulbright fellowships to teach entrepreneurship at the National Economics University in Hanoi, Vietnam (2012) and at the Polytechnic in Windhoek, Namibia (2015). Goldberg has also been a visiting professor teaching courses on entrepreneurial management and finance at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and the ALBA Graduate School of Business in Athens, Greece. He has conducted seminars on behalf of the US Department of State on entrepreneurship in Argentina, Austria, Botswana, Cambodia, Chile, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Kosovo, Laos, Macedonia, Morocco, Myanmar, Namibia, the Netherlands, Philippines, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Goldberg is active in the entrepreneurship community in Cleveland, serving as a mentor to entrepreneurs through Jumpstart and FlashStarts. He has appeared as a frequent guest panelist on MSNBC’s “Your Business” and written on international entrepreneurship for CNBC, Entrepreneur.com and The Huffington Post. Goldberg earned a BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, MA in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University and MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Goldberg is looking forward to his first trip to Tanzania and getting a deeper understanding of how social entrepreneurs are supported (or where there are opportunities to strengthen access to capital and mentoring). He is also eager to use some of the Swahili he learned as a high school student in 1987 when he spent 6 weeks living in Kenya. Jambo! |
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