Anne Swift

Anne is passionate about bringing new technologies to market, cleantech entrepreneurship, and collaborative innovation systems. Glamour Magazine named Anne a visionary who will change the world for her work with Young Inventors International.

As the founder of Young Inventors, Anne has trained more than 3,000 university innovators around the world, at institutions such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Northeastern University. Under Anne’s leadership, Young Inventors held conferences at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Toronto. She is the pioneer of BrainBuzz, a structured methodology for using collaborating teams to solve technology challenges at institutions such as MIT's Innovations in International Health and the Ashoka Foundation.

Currently, Anne works on the marketing team at SunRun, the nation's leading home solar company. In early 2008, Anne co-founded a solar thermal building materials start-up, which currently operates out of Toronto, Canada. Anne has also consulted for the MaRS Discovery District, the Cleantech Venture Network, and technology start-up companies, including many social ventures. She has been a judge of several business plan competitions, including the MIT IDEAS Competition, the Stanford BASES Competition, Ashoka-Lemelson Invention Competition, and San Jose State University’s Neat Ideas Fair.

With training as an economist, Anne has conducted research on how organizations can successfully work together to identify and commercialize innovations, as well as how innovations arise in collaborative group settings. Anne’s work included research positions with the Innovation Systems Research Network at the University of Toronto and Carnegie Mellon University with support from the Kauffman Foundation. Anne also holds certificates from the World Intellectual Property Organization in intellectual property and management of innovation. Anne’s work has appeared in Science Magazine, IEEE Spectrum, Forbes, Popular Science, NPR, and many other major media outlets. For more information about Anne’s background, please visit www.anneswift.com.