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Adam Mossoff

Professor of Law, George Mason University; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; IP and innovation historian and policy expert; CIPU Board of Directors

Adam Mossoff is Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He is a Founder and past-Executive Director of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP now C-IP2). His academic research has been cited by the Supreme Court, by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and by federal agencies.

 

Professor Mossoff has been invited to testify several times before the Senate and the House on proposed patent legislation, and he has spoken at numerous congressional staff briefings. His writings on patent law and policy have appeared in The New York Times, Forbes and many other media outlets. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Copyright Alliance and has served as past Chair of the IP Committee of the IEEE-USA. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he chairs Hudson's Forum for Intellectual Property, is a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and is a member of the CIPU board of directors. 

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Andrei Iancu

Chairman, Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP); Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell; Under Secretary of Commerce and USPTO Director, 2018-2021.]

Andrei Iancu is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell in Los Angeles and Chairman of the Council for Innovation Promotion, focusing on technology and intellectual property issues. He has represented clients across the technical and scientific spectra, including those associated with medical devices, genetic testing, therapeutics, the Internet, telephony, TV broadcasting and video game systems.

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From 2018 to 2021, he served as the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a position to which he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. As head of the USPTO, Andrei oversaw one of the largest IP offices in the world. He also served as the administration’s principal advisor on domestic and international policy matters. Among Andrei’s initiatives in this role was the creation of the National Council for Expanding American Innovation, a group of industry, academia and government leaders tasked with helping the USPTO develop a national strategy to broaden participation in the innovation ecosystem.

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Prior to his government service, Andrei spent two decades at Irell & Manella and served as the firm’s managing partner from 2012 to 2018. Andrei co-founded the Renewing American Innovation Project at the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He previously taught patent law at UCLA School of Law. He received his J.D., M.S. in mechanical engineering, and B.S. in aerospace engineering from UCLA.He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering in 1989, a Master of Science in mechanical engineering in 1990, and a Juris Doctor in 1996, all from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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​Andrew (Andy) Sherman

Executive Vice President, General Counsel, Dolby Labs

Andy Sherman oversees Dolby’s patent and IP licensing businesses, government relations, and Dolby's worldwide legal affairs, including all corporate, regulatory, intellectual property, litigation, and licensing activities. Andy also serves as the chair of the board of directors of Via Licensing, a leading global provider of multilateral patent licensing solutions.Prior to joining Dolby, Andy served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel at CBS Interactive, where he led the legal group advising CBS's online entertainment, mobile, technology, sports, news, games, lifestyle, and international business units.

 

Andy joined CBS Interactive following CBS's acquisition of CNET Networks, where he was Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary, responsible for global legal and regulatory matters. Earlier in his career, Andy worked in private practice with Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich (now DLA Piper), specializing in the representation of emerging technology companies in intellectual property and technology-related legal matters. Andy holds a JD from the University of the Pacific, as well as a BS degree from the University of Southern California. Andy is the executive sponsor of Mundo, Dolby’s employee network dedicated to the Hispanic members of the Dolby community. Andy was born in Uruguay and grew up in Argentina and other international locations. dolby.com

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Akeem Shannon – Featured Speaker

Entrepreneur, Flipstik; Inventor; Survivor

At 15 Akeem Shannon was bullied for being different; at 19 he flunked out Howard University; at 23 at was committed to a mental hospital; and at 28 he appeared on Shark Tank, after which he was able to scale his business, Flipstik, to $10+ million, and convince Snoop Dogg he was a branding genius.

 

Determined to redeem himself Akeem himself after dropping out of Howard, where he was on full scholarship, he worked at several Fortune 500 companies and a major FinTech company where he was a top sales associate. He made a great living  but was not fulfilled. Akeem’s uncle, a NASA engineer, told him about a reusable adhesive based on the feet of geckos that NASA had developed in the 1970s. This would lead to Flipstik, a gravity-defying phone accessory.

 

In 2018 Akeem taught himself to write a patent, file trademarks and launched his product on Kickstarter. The next few years would be a journey of ups and downs. He applied to Shark Tank in 2019 but after months of talks with producers, was not selected to appear on the show. He participated in a music competition that ultimately help him land a deal with a business mogul who would introduce him to executives at AT&T and to the Rapper Snoop Dogg. They would help him connect with the Shark Tank producers in 2020 and he finally landed a spot on the show. In 2022 Flipstik would grow 1000% landing distribution nationwide in Target, BestBuy, AT&T, T-Mobile, QVC, and others. The device is now sold in over 3000 retailers and launched five new products in 2023.

 

Akeem works as a volunteer mentor and biz coach at Big Brother Big Sister, UMSL Accelerate, Arch Grants, and NFTE. He also partnered with The Brookings Institute on the Olin Brookings Commission to level the playing field in Venture capital for unrepresented minorities and women. Akeem's story was featured at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s “Cellphone: Unseen Connections” exhibition in Washington, and in INC Magazines top 50 fasting growing consumer product companies in 2023.

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Brian Hinman

Chief Innovation Officer, Xockets, Inc; ex-Aon IP Solutions; fmr CIPO, Philips; VP Licensing IBM; CIPU Board of Directors

Brian Hinman is President and Chief Intellectual Property Officer of Xockets, Inc., developer of a new class of cloud processors known as advanced Data Processing Units, or DPUs. DPUs free server processors, including CPUs, GPUs, and hybrids of these host processors, from data-intensive workloads that would otherwise slow down distributed computing and the growth of the cloud industry.

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An IP Hall of Fame member, he previously served as Chief Innovation Officer at Aon Intellectual Property Solutions.  Mr. Hinman is part of the senior leadership team, where he helps lead efforts for Aon to establish market-accepted standards for assessing IP assets. Mr. Hinman has more than 30 years of experience in the IP field and in 2023 was inducted by IAM into the IP Hall of Fame.

 

Prior to joining Aon, Mr. Hinman served as chief IP officer at Philips, based in the Netherlands, where he led a worldwide team of more than 400 IP professionals in nine countries. He engaged in many forms of IP monetization, including patent, technology, and brand licensing, design patents, know-how and the formation of IP ventures. Prior to Philips, Mr. Hinman was Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Unified Patents Inc, Vice President of Intellectual Property and Licensing at IBM, Verizon, and InterDigital, and was founding CEO of Allied Security Trust.

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Bruce Berman

Managing Director, Brody Berman Associates; Co-founder & Chairman, CIPU; Author; Investor; Publisher

Bruce Beman is Managing Director of Brody Berman Associates, a management consulting and communications firm that serves innovative businesses and investors. Brody Berman has supported more than 200 businesses and IP portfolios since 1988, as well as many law firms and their clients on various IP litigation and transactions. In 2016, he co-founded the Center for IP Understanding, which he serves as chairman. Bruce is responsible for five books about the business of IP, including From Ideas to Assets. His articles have appeared in Forbes, Nature Biotechnology, National Law Review and The New York Times. 

 

'Understanding IP Matters,' a critically acclaimed podcast series he hosts, gives guests the opportunity to share their IP story, including the journey from creator ro entrepreneur. It has generated mofr than 10,000 downloads. His Intangible Investor column appears regularly on IP Watchdog. The column had appeared in every issue of IAM magazine from 2003 to 2019, 97 in all. IP CloseUp, a weekly update on trends he publishes, is read in more than 60 countries and has received more than 427,000 visits. Bruce holds a Masters’ Degree film scholarship from Columbia University, where he taught for four years and completed course work and comprehensives for the Ph.D.

brodyberman.com; understandingip.org

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Danny Marti

Head of Public Affairs and Global Policy, Tencent

Danny Marti oversees the global public affairs function at Tencent, one of the largest technology and entertainment companies in the world. At Tencent, Danny serves as a member of the Tencent Americas Management Committee, He also serves on various external boards, including Tequila Works (Madrid), Funcom (Oslo), the Emory Law Alumni Board, and the International Trademark Association (INTA).

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Danny has had a career in both public and private service dedicated to IP and innovation law and policy. He served at the White House as President Obama’s U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (“IP Czar”) and was sworn into office by then-Vice President Biden. Earlier, Mr. Marti served as Head of Global Government Affairs at London-based RELX Group (Elsevier and LexisNexis), a FTSE 100 provider of scientific, technical and medical information and analytics, legal information and decision-making tools. He has served as Vice Chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Innovation Policy Center; and as Managing Partner of the Washington, D.C. office of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton. He is a graduate of Emory University School of Law (JD) and Georgetown University (BA). INTA interview.

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David Lowery

Singer-Songwriter; 300+ songs, 25 studio & live albums; educator, futurist

David Lowery is a guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, mathematician, and activist. He is the founder of the alternative rock band Camper Van Beethoven and the co-founder of Cracker, a more traditional rock band.

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Camper Van Beethoven, formed in 1983 in Santa Cruz, CA. He has worked as  a derivatives trader and financial analyst and has started a number of music-related businesses, including a studio, a record company and a publishing company Dr. Lowery's extensive experience in business led to his appointment as a lecturer in the University of Georgia’s music business program. Charles Pitter at PopMatters has said that "in addition to this work, Lowery teaches as a lecturer and has a consistently high profile in the media as a champion of artists rights.” 

 

Lowery is critical of the internet era and says that things may be worse now for working musicians than they were under the old record system. In 2012, he gave a widely shared interview to NPR called "Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss" in which he criticized Pandora Radio for low songwriter royalties, claiming to have made less than $17 from a million streams of his song "Low." Wikipedia entry

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Efrat Kasznik

Stanford Graduate School of Business; President, Foresight Valuation Group

Efrat Kasznik is President of Foresight Valuation Group, a Silicon-Valley based IP valuation and strategy consulting firm. Ms. Kasznik also serves as a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she has been teaching MBA and executive education classes for over a decade. Efrat has over 25 years of IP consulting experience, focusing on assisting IP holders across industries with the valuation, commercialization, and monetization of their intangible assets. She helps clients, ranging in size from Fortune 100 companies to start-ups, with IP and business valuations in support of licensing deals, IP and technology acquisitions, M&A transactions, financial reporting, strategic planning, and fundraising. She also frequently serves as a testifying expert in disputes involving IP and startup valuations and damages, in civil litigation and in family court. 

 

Efrat currently serves on the Board of LES USA-Canada, as well as on the Board of the LES Silicon Valley Chapter. She is Chair of the upcoming LES 2022 Annual Meeting in San Francisco (October 2022).  Efrat has been recognized as one of the top IP strategists in the world by IAM 300 for 9 years in a row (2013-2021).  She has been a co-founder, CFO and Board member in several startups, and is an active mentor and advisor in the startup community, where she has worked with hundreds of startups, accelerators and incubators in Silicon Valley, Europe and Israel. https://foresightvaluation.com/

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James Conley

Clinical Professor of Technology, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; Fellow, National Academy of Inventors

James Conley is clinical professor of technology at Northwestern University. He serves on the faculty of both the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. He is a faculty contributor in the Kellogg Center for Research in Technology & Innovation and serves as a Faculty Fellow at the Segal Design Institute (NU IDEA). Beyond academia, Professor Conley is an inventor, an active advocate of IP education for business and other students and leads seminars globally for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He is a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) fellow. 

 

Professor Conley was appointed a member of the U.S. Department of Commerce Trademark Public Advisory Committee (TPAC) of the Patent and Trademark Office and has been an expert and author for the UN based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He serves on the board of several companies and the US Intellectual Property Allliance and the Illinois Intellectual Property Alliance. Professor Conley's research investigates the strategic use of intangible assets and intellectual properties to build and sustain competitive advantage. Kellogg School of Management, under Professor Conley’s leadership, partnered with CIPU on the 2021 and 2024 IP Awareness Summits. https://www.jamesconley.org/

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Jerry Ma

Chief AI Officer & Director of Emerging Technology, USPTO; fmr senior roles in AI research at Facebook, now Meta

Jerry Ma is an executive, technologist, and registered patent practitioner who serves as Chief AI Officer and Director of Emerging Technology at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Jerry hails from an industry background including management and senior technical roles at Facebook AI Research, Quora, and Hummingbird Regtech. He has overseen initiatives resulting in the world’s first public-domain superhuman Go bot and the first deep neural network to be trained on the known protein universe.

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Jerry is an avid developer and scientist, publishing at venues such as ICML, ICLR, AAAI, and S&P. He has explored diverse topics including the mathematics of nonconvex optimization, quasi-linguistic structure in proteins and passwords, and energy-based neural modeling of atomic structures. As an educator, Jerry has taught computer science & mathematics in undergraduate, graduate, and professional settings. Jerry earned an A.B. in Economics and the Classics from Harvard University.

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John Dubiansky

Senior Director, IP and Standards Policy, Dolby Labs

John Dubiansky is Senior Director, Intellectual Property and Standards Policy at Dolby Laboratories. His responsibilities include policy issues related to intellectual property and standardization arising in various forms, including governments and standards development organizations.

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Prior to joining Dolby, John was an Attorney Advisor, Intellectual Property at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Policy Planning, focusing on issues at the intersection of competition and intellectual property. He was a contributor to Commission projects such as the 2016 Report on Patent Assertion Entity Activity and the 2018 Hearings on Competition and Consumer Welfare. Previously, John was a patent litigator at several law firms in the Washington, D.C. area, including Howrey and Kirkland & Ellis. He received his J.D. from the Harvard Law School and has a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University. dolby.com

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Jonathan Barnett

Director, USC’s Law, Media, Entertainment & Technology Law Program; Author

Jonathan Barnett is Director of the USC Gould School of Law’s Media, Entertainment and Technology Law Program. He is author of the recently published The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property, a critically-acclaimed book that has generated discussion about the IP system. He also wrote Innovators, Firms, and Markets: The Organizational Logic of Intellectual Property. Barnett specializes in antitrust, intellectual property, and corporate and business law, with a focus on innovation policy and strategy in technology markets. Barnett has published in the Harvard Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Yale Law Journal, Journal of Legal Studies, and other scholarly journals.

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He joined USC in 2006 and was a visiting professor at NYU School of Law in 2010. He is also an academic affiliate of the International Center for Law & Economics. Prior to academia, Barnett practiced corporate law as a senior associate at Cleary Gottlieb LLP in New York, specializing in private equity and mergers and acquisitions transactions. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Barnett received a MPhil from Cambridge University and a JD from Yale Law School. USC Gould School Of Law 

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Jonathan Taplin

Film Producer; Director Emeritus, Innovation Lab at USC; Author

Jonathan Taplin is an film producer, author and scholar. He is Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016 in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. Jon began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival five times.

 

Jon's 2017 book, Move Fast and Break Things, documents the rise and impact of big tech. His most recent book, is The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. Jon has written for the Wall Street Journal and many other publications and worked for a period in the 1990s in mergers and acquisitions for Merrill Lynch. He developed the first video streaming-on-demand platform over which he sued YouTube for  patent infringement. Wikipedia entry.

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Karen Silverman

Leading Technology Governance, Regulation and AI Strategy Expert, CEO and Founder

Karen is a leading global expert in practical governance strategies for AI and other frontier technologies. As the CEO and Founder of The Cantellus Group, she advises Fortune 50 companies, startups, consortia, and the public sector on how to manage cutting-edge technologies in a rapidly changing policy environment. Her expertise is informed by more than 20 years of practice and management leadership at Latham & Watkins, LLP where she advised global businesses in complex antitrust matters, M&A, governance, ESG, and crisis management.

Karen has been named one of the Top Ten Legal Innovators by the Financial Times and one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. 

 

Karen serves on the ABA Task Force on the Law and Artificial Intelligence, was a World Economic Forum Global Innovator and a member of their Experts Network and an SME to the Business Roundtable. She sits on the Fast Company Impact Council and serves on the board of AIEDU and Not For Sale. She is a frequent speaker and author on technology and corporate governance and AI issues. Karen holds a BA from Wellesley College and a JD in Law from the University of California, Berkeley. Cantellus Group.

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Loren Newman

Director, Policy and Business Affairs, Dolby Labs

Loren is a strategist, consultant, technologist and writer dedicated to the small steps necessary for big changes in the world. Previously he was Government Affairs Lead at World Economic Forum and participated in Global Initiatives at Alibaba in Hangshou, China. At the Berkman Klein Center and MIT Media Lab in Cambridge we was a Project Specialist, and he served as a legal analyst for Google. Loren holds a Masters’ Degree from the Harvard Kennedy School in Public Affairs and a Bachelor’ Degree from Stanford.dolby.com

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Mark Cohen

China IP Expert, Senior Technology Fellow, Asia Society; ex-UC Berkeley School of Law; ex-USPTO China Team head

Mark Cohen is Senior Technology Fellow Asia Society of Northern California and former head of the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law School.  Previously, Mark was Senior Counsel, China in the Office of Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, after serving as a visiting professor at Fordham Law School (2011-2012). Prior to that time, he served in such functions as: Director, International Intellectual Property at Microsoft Corporation; Of Counsel to Jones Day’s Beijing office; and Senior Intellectual Property Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (2004- 2008). Mark holds a J.D. degree from Columbia University (1984), an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Chinese Language and Literature (1979) and a B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany in Chinese Studies.China IPR

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Michael Waltrip

Managing Director, IP Strategy and Commercialization, Xerox (also leads IP at SRI and PARC)

Michael Waltrip is managing director of the Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC’s) Intellectual Capital Management and Xerox’s Intellectual Property Strategy and Commercialization groups. He heads intellectual property monetization for both PARC and the rest of Xerox, while leading the creation of policies, training and strategy for IP development and commercialization across the organizations. In 2023, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) joined SRI, bringing together two iconic Silicon Valley research organizations to build, expand, and scale capabilities.

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Michael applies his experience in venture investments, diligence and portfolio management, as well as complex commercial transactions, to lead a diverse set of activities ranging from early-stage portfolio assessment and development to the negotiation and structuring of transactions. He has led a wide variety of engagements from large scale sponsored research with corporate sponsors such as Samsung, Dai Nippon Printing, 3M, SolarWorld, Microsoft and Alcon to the spin-out of PARC technology into venture-backed start-ups.

Before joining PARC in 2005, Michael was counsel to the Acer Group’s venture funds in the US, where he was responsible for all legal matters for US investments.​ Michael comes from the software industry and is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Hastings College of the Law. In addition to his duties at PARC and Xerox over the years, and now SRI, Michael continues to maintain a close ties to the venture world, advising venture funds and start-ups across a variety of topics. xerox.com

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Talal Shamoon

CEO, Intertrust Technologies; PatentShield

Talal Shamoon is the CEO of Intertrust, which he joined in 1997 as a member of the research staff. After holding a series of executive positions, he was named CEO in 2003 when Sony and Philips acquired the company. As an early pioneer of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in the late 90s, Talal led Intertrust’s business and technology initiatives in the entertainment and media industries, which includes significant licenses with with most IT, consumer electronics and mobile manufacturers and service operators.

 

Prior to joining Intertrust, Talal was a researcher at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ, where he focused on digital signal processing and content security. Talal sits on the boards of  iwhiteCryption and Kiora, and he chairs the board of directors of Planet OS. A recognized inventor and published author, Talal holds B.S., M. Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University. He is named on more than a dozen patents. www.Intertrust.com

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Tiffany Norwood (pending)

Serial Entrepreneur; Inventor; Creator; Author; 2022 Cornell University Entrepreneur of the Year; CIPU Board of Directors

At 27 Tiffany Norwood raised over $670 million dollars to fund a startup to build the first global digital radio platform and launch three satellites into space. The capital helped to establish XM Radio. As one the first successful black female tech entrepreneur, Tiffany's career has spanned 52 countries, 30+ years and seven startups. Tiffany established her first start-up as a teenager and had been granted a patent by the age of 23. Her ventures have ranged from the first one-strap backpack to the automation technology behind self-install kits for broadband internet, and a virtual reality gaming platform. In 2022, she was named Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year.

 

Tiffany has led some of the first digital content licensing deals, including those with Bloomberg News and CNN International. She was also an early collaborator with the Fraunhofer Institute on their MPEG technologies. Tiffany is the Founder and CEO of Tribetan, a company that teaches entrepreneurship and innovation literacy as a life skill and the human science of success. Venues with which she has consulted include the European Parliament, Yale, the USPTO, KMPG and the South African Embassy. Her dream is that the science of turning imagination into reality is as well-known to the core curriculum as reading, writing, and math. Tiffany received an MBA from Harvard and a Bachelor’s in Economics with a concentration in statistics and electrical engineering from Cornell. https://tiffanynorwood.com/

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