UNMC will continue its Breakthrough Thinking Conference Series on Jan. 27 with online presentations focused on innovation and entrepreneurship.
The annual, thought-provoking series is open to all UNMC faculty, staff and students.
The Jan. 27 event will be from noon to 2 p.m. CT and feature:
- Sonia Marciano, PhD, clinical professor at the New York University Stern School of Management, discussing "What is Enterprise Strategy?" and
- Julie Lenzer, chief innovation officer at the University of Maryland (UMD) and founding director for the newly-launched Quantum Startup Foundry, discussing "What if? The Art of Possibility Thinking."
Dr. Marciano also serves as the Stern academic director for TRIUM, a joint executive MBA program that includes Stern, the London School of Economics and the HEC School of Management. Prior to Stern, Dr. Marciano was at the Columbia Business School and Harvard’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, where she developed content for the Institute's Microeconomics of Competitiveness course which she also co-taught.
During her career, Dr. Marciano also has worked at the Kellogg School of Management, lectured at the University of Chicago and taught in both executive and full-time programs for the Wharton School and Yale School of Management. She currently teaches core strategy as well as electives in advanced strategy and global competition. In addition, she teaches strategy and economics for corporate executive education programs in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Lenzer, in her roles, is charged with fostering and deploying innovation to drive economic and social impact from both university-affiliated and community-based innovators and oversees the university’s tech transfer office, the Maryland Small Business Development Center, the Veteran’s Business Outreach Center and the Mixed/Augmented/Virtual Reality Innovation Center, as well as university engagement with the Discovery District, UMD’s 150-acre research park. An active angel investor, she also is on the investment committee of the $10M Maryland Momentum Fund and UMD’s newly-launched Discovery Fund.
Prior to joining the university, Lenzer was appointed to lead the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) within the U.S. Department of Commerce. As director of the OIE, she drove programs and policies that supported innovative economic development such as innovation-based entrepreneurship and regional innovation clusters. She created the Regional Innovation Strategies program (now called Build to Scale) and led the deployment $40M in grants across the U.S. over her 2 ½-year tenure, resulting in over 14,000 new jobs and $1.6B in capital raised.