Who We Are
Marina Gorbis
Executive Director
Follow Marina on Twitter: @mgorbis
Marina has directed a variety of programs since joining IFTF in 1999 and is currently executive director, a position she assumed in 2006. During her tenure here, she has worked with hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy, bringing a future perspective to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, and design new products and services. A native of Odessa, Ukraine, she is particularly well suited to see things from a global viewpoint. She has been a guest blogger on BoingBoing.net, writes for IFTF and major media outlets, and is a frequent speaker on future organizational, technology, and social issues.
Marina’s current research focus is social production (aggregating microcontributions from large networks of people utilizing social tools and technologies to create a new kind of wealth) and how it is changing the face of business, medicine, education, banking, scientific research, and government, a topic explored in detail in her 2013 book The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. Her interest is in how new technologies are giving individuals so much power to connect and share resources that we are entering a new era and inventing radically new types of organizations and services. She holds a BA in psychology and a master’s of public policy from UC Berkeley.