What We Do
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 new 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.
Making the Future
“To paraphrase Margaret Mead, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions—from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate—are being profoundly reshaped. We are all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.”