Valeria Budinich

Valeria is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship. where she is researching scaling up innovations designed to improve people's lives and the Earth's sustainability through systems change entrepreneurship. Her extensive experience in more than 26 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America/Caribbean regions has helped her to learn and understand innovation through the eyes of local communities and change agents. Her research on innovation ecosystems focuses on ways to support innovators and system-change entrepreneurs to augment their ability to solve complex social issues through entrepreneurship.

Valeria is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Legatum Center at MIT Sloan where she is focused on innovation ecosystems to support innovators and system change entrepreneurs, and developing new capacity-building approaches to augment their ability to solve complex social issues. She is advancing thought leadership and conducting research on high-impact innovations and entrepreneurship for economic justice, sustainable development, and inclusive markets. Her research is focused on the insights and learnings of civil society leaders and changemakers who are transforming economies for the good of all and integrating their innovations and learnings to MIT approach to system change.

As a Global Leadership Group Member, she played a critical role in ensuring that Ashoka’s 58 teams around the world become increasingly aligned and outcome-focused in navigating strategic planning and developing action plans. In partnership with key influencers throughout the organization, she co-led the development and implementation of this new architecture for strategic planning, shared learning, and measuring results. This process is transforming Ashoka’s organizational management culture by enabling a deeper level of strategic alignment, promoting higher levels of collaboration across teams, and fostering decentralized yet integrated program operations. This change has been possible through a collaborative approach to conceive, pilot test, learn, improve, and spread a new strategic planning and budgeting process that incentivizes Ashoka teams and their partners to work together towards common strategic goals and shared impact measurements. Co-led a two-year Ashoka-McKinsey team that researched new leadership models of leading system changers and social innovators and how they could transform the leadership practices of business innovators. Initial research findings were published in a McKinsey Quarterly article titled “Answering society’s call: A new leadership imperative” (November 2019). Valeria continues serving as one of the global Chairs of Ashoka Fellows Selection Panels.

As Chief Entrepreneur and CEO, conceived and led Ashoka’s Full Economic Citizenship Initiative (FEC), a global initiative pioneering system change innovations based on ‘hybrid value chains, a new conceptual framework to identify and unleash major market opportunities with the capacity to transform markets for social impact and economic justice. Co-authored alongside Bill Drayton, Ashoka’s CEO and Founder, a Harvard Business Review article titled “A New Alliance for Social Change” (September 2010) which has served as an inspiration to 100,000 practitioners pioneering social and business innovations. Engaged over 50 leading civil society organizations and corporate teams in HVC applications in the housing, healthcare, and nutrition industries as well as small farmer economies in Asia and Latin America. Mobilized private and philanthropic resources to enable more inclusive markets, and supported leading business and social entrepreneurs in the co-development of products and services as well as building cost-effective distribution channels. As a researcher and evaluator, co-developed and co-produced - in alliance with Hystra - a series of reports on economic inclusion synthesizing research on new trends, and assessing the innovation potential of hundreds of state-of-the-art system change innovations in Energy, Housing, ICT, Sanitation, and Safe Water. This work was later expanded into a comprehensive review of the scaling-up potential of over 1,000 innovative business solutions to social needs and published as a book, alongside Oliver Kayser. “Scaling Business Solutions to Social Problems: A Practical Guidebook for Social and Business Entrepreneurs” (Palgrave, 2015) is now available in English and French and has become part of the reference materials on inclusive economies in leading business schools.

Co-led the design, resource mobilization and implementation phases of the first seed capital fund in Chile financing exclusively enterprises at the start-up stage. The first round of investors were all local individual private investors who wanted to demonstrate the power of angel investing. Advised Fernando Flores, BDA’s Founder and Chairman in the development of “Club de Emprendedores”, an Iberoamerican initiative promoting entrepreneurship across the business, the public sector, and civil society. Incorporated civil society in the core design of “Club of Entrepreneurs” and expanded its regional network of private, public, and social sector entrepreneurs. Led the development of “Odisea Latina,” a business social venture focusing on promoting youth entrepreneurship through a coaching and collaborative competition model.

Founding Vice-President for this non-governmental organization based in New York with local offices today in 12 countries. Endeavor’s mission is to be the leading supporter of entrepreneurship in emerging markets by linking leading local entrepreneurs with annual revenues of US$1 million to US$15 million with U.S. venture capital firms and local investors. Main accomplishments included starting-up field operations in Chile, supporting the development of operations in Argentina, searching and evaluating investment opportunities and business entrepreneurs for Endeavor’s first two Selection Panels in Chile and Argentina as well as writing 22 investment profiles for business entrepreneurs and delivering endeavor’s advisory services in partnership with leading business schools.

Served as Senior Advisor to the President and led a team of inter-disciplinary experts and evaluation specialists involved in the design and implementation of EWW’s impact and monitoring system. Main responsibilities included leading the strategic planning process, consolidating program methodology, and directing all impact assessment-related tasks. Over a period of five years, this new impact evaluation framework and strategic planning process guided EWW’s program design, monitoring, and evaluation efforts transforming its grant-making strategy and increasing the overall impact of the organization by a factor of 15. Led the design and implementation of a quality assurance program that established staff performance indicators linked to the overall impact of EnterpriseWorks' programs, increasing its impact and outreach from 10,000 individual beneficiaries in 1990 to over 165,000 micro and small entrepreneurs in 1995. By the year 2000, this small foundation and its partner organizations were improving the lives of over half a million people annually.

Responsible for supervising Regional Directors for Programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America/Caribbean, Evaluation Unit, and Finance. Led a team that transformed EWW from a small grant-making foundation into a leveraging institution that raised during the first five years over US$ 25 million in financial resources from 20 different public and private clients, including multi-lateral banks, U.N. agencies, bi-lateral cooperation agencies, and private foundations. Oversaw the implementation of a de-centralization plan that expanded the number of EWW field offices from one to seven, increasing field staff to 120 employees while reducing overhead expenses to less than half. Negotiated the execution of over 40 grants. Managed a US$17 million cooperative agreement with USAID. Directed the expansion of EnterpriseWorks' operations from an annual budget level of $3 million to over $10 million while substantially diversifying funding base.

Managed operations in the LA/C region. The portfolio was made up of 12 projects in 7 countries focusing on promoting technology transfer and enterprise development activities in support of small producers. Supervised a staff of 4 program officers. Marketed programs and services to bilateral and multilateral organizations as well as public and private sector entities to extend EnterpriseWorks' regional activities. Conceptualized overall program and design projects in collaboration with NGOs, producers' organizations, and other grassroots development groups. Conceived, developed, and negotiated a U.N.-funded $4.5 million program to assist in improving the income of camelid producers in the Bolivian Highlands. The project became the largest ever to be implemented by EWW and its innovative approach was used as a basis for the new EWW’s global program approach. The project achieved impact at a national scale by linking Bolivian alpaca fiber producers with Italian markets and allowing participating producers to double their incomes.

Monitored a portfolio of 10 technical cooperation grants with a combined value of U.S. $1.5 million in Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and México. Managed teams of international and local consultants involved in the preparation of market assessments, feasibility studies, technology appraisals, as well as financial and commercial analyses. Designed, in collaboration with local NGOs and small producer's organizations, eight applied research programs focusing on testing and demonstrating the commercial viability of innovative micro-enterprise and cooperatives. Project formulation involved developing an in-depth understanding of market, financial and technological constraints faced by micro-entrepreneurs and farmers in sub-sectors such as building materials, food processing, aquaculture, wool production, and processing. Organized, in conjunction with representatives from the Government of México and world-renowned experts from Oxford University, an international conference on "Política Económica, Tecnología y Pequeño Productor Rural." Defined scope of 14 case studies and coordinated all programmatic aspects of this event in which over 70 senior representatives from the public and private sectors participated.