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Marina Gorbis

Marina Gorbis is Executive Director of Institute for the Future, a 42-year old non-profit research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley. The Institute is dedicated to helping people think systematically about the future in order to make better decisions today. 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 improve innovation capacity, develop strategies, 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 andmajor media outlets. She is a frequent speaker on future organizational, technology, and social issues. She holds a Master’s Degree from the Graduate School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.