About Maria

The hallmark of Maria’s professional life is achieving sustainable business outcomes having a public benefit and social impact. Maria nurtures inclusive ecosystems to help people overcome the limitations of their circumstances and solve problems by working together.

She accomplishes this through deep intercultural competency. Maria has worked for academic, for-profit, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations in a wide variety of international environments and industry sectors (especially agriculture, energy, water and health). Maria engenders trust across stakeholder groups, whether they’re divided by differences in geography, sectoral or organizational culture.

Maria is a results-driven operational leader, whose management style emphasizes empowerment and enablement. Maria architects, leads and grows programs that provide entrepreneurial support and develop SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) through commercialization of appropriate technology and business model innovation. She has fostered the launch and scale-up of numerous ventures in the developing world and transition economies, and has founded several startup companies herself.

Maria was most recently Economic Development Strategist at a world-class academic institution in the Arab region and formerly led the Technology Transfer team.  She has devised, iterated and implemented some truly novel programmatic solutions to achieve bold missions in some challenging environments, mostly in Eurasia and the Middle East. Maria is currenty helping a number of startups, scale-up their operations.

This blog tell some of those stories.

Twitter: @MariaDouglass
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariadouglass
about.me/mdouglass

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Ralph Waldo Emerson