Marina Gorbis

During Gorbis' tenure with IFTF and previously with SRI International, she has worked with hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy, bringing a future perspective to develop vision and strategies, improve innovation capacity, and design new products and services. A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Gorbis is particularly suited to see things from a global perspective. She has worked all over the world and feels equally at home in Silicon Valley, Europe, India, or Kazakhstan.

Before becoming IFTF's Executive Director in 2006, Gorbis created the Global Innovation Forum, a project comparing innovation strategies in different regions, and she founded Global Ethnographic Network (GEN), a multi-year ethnographic research program aimed at understanding daily lives of people in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Silicon Valley. She has been a guest blogger on BoingBoing.net and writes for IFTF and major media outlets. She is a frequent speaker on future organizational, technology, and social issues and has keynoted high-level events, such as the World Business Forum, National Association of Broadcasters annual convention, Western Association of Schools and Colleges annual conference, and many others.

An innovative thinker and writer, Gorbis is currently finishing a book tentatively titled Socialstructing: Designing for the Future, to be released by Simon Shuster in January 2013. The book provides a bold vision and a guide to the new de-institutionalized economic landscape on the horizon.