Innovation Summit - Meridian International Center

Speaker Biographies
Mari Kuraishi is the co-founder and President of GlobalGiving. She joined
the World Bank in 1991 and served as country officer for Russia, and
subsequently oversaw strategy development, budget allocation, and change
management. She also created one of the Bank’s most innovative projects,
the first ever Innovation and Development Marketplaces. The Development
Marketplace has been recognized as a leading example of public sector
innovation in the Harvard Business Review. She was most recently named
as one of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. She currently
serves as the chair of the board of the Global Business School Network, and
is on the board of Guidestar US. She has also served on various committees
of the Independent Sector.
Stanley S. Litow is the President of the IBM Foundation and IBM’s Vice
President for Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs. In this capacity,
he helped create IBM’s Corporate Service Corps, a corporate version of the
Peace Corps which deploys 500 IBM top emerging leaders in community
assignments in 30 countries of the developing world. Before joining IBM, Mr.
Litow served as the Deputy Chancellor of Schools for New York City. Prior
to his service with the City’s public schools, he founded and ran Interface,
the non profit “think tank” and served as an aide to both the Mayor and
Governor of New York. He has served as an adjunct faculty at New School
University, the City University of New York and Long Island University and
was voted CEO of the Year by Corporate Responsibility Magazine in 2009 and 2010. He served
on the President’s Welfare to Work Commission, and currently serves on the board of Harvard
Business School’s Initiative on Social Enterprise, Citizen’s Budget Commission, and The After
School Corporation (TASC). Mr. Litow is a recipient of the Council on Foundation’s prestigious
Scrivner Award for creative philanthropy and several other awards.
Leslie Martinkovics is Director of International Public Policy and
Regulatory Affairs for Verizon Communications. He is the company’s primary
point of contact to multilateral organizations such as the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU), where he is the Vice Chairman of a study
group dealing with charging and tariffing issues. He also participates in
regional organizations in the Americas (CITEL) and the Asia-Pacific region
(APEC TEL), where he works on a wide range of Internet, spectrum, and
technology policy issues. He is a Vice Chair of the United States Council for
International Business (USCIB), and a member of the U.S. ITU Association
board of directors. Prior to joining Verizon in 1999, he was the Managing
Director of LJM International.
15