Andrea Carafa currently serves as Director of the Blackstone Launchpad powered by Techstars, QB3 Entrepreneur in Residence, as well as CIED Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been named a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, member of the Fast Company Impact Council, member of the Partnership on AI, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Ambassador and Judge, member of the UN U4SSC Group on AI in Cities, Berkeley Skydeck mentor, member of the Review Committee for America's Seed Fund of the National Science Foundation, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and Delegate to the UN Science, Technology and Innovation Forum. Through his cross-sector work, he champions a humanistic approach to technology, catalyzes responsible AI and deep tech solutions, and builds bridges between startups, investors, academia, policymakers, and corporations.
Previously, he advised startups and policymakers, conducted research, and lectured on technology innovation, human-centered design, and entrepreneurship at Stanford, the University of Milan Bicocca, and the European Commission. He co-developed an EU Knowledge Alliance which connected Stanford and several European partners to spur greater innovation and venture creation in European universities. At Stanford, he also helped design and launch Emergence, an initiative that catalyzes entrepreneurship for sustainability and health.
As an entrepreneur, Andrea founded and led the food biotech startup Vita, the innovation studio GYE, and the consumer tech startup ArtsUp, which grew across 300+ cities on four continents. He also created and chaired the Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative at President Obama's Global Entrepreneurship Summit. Andrea was an EU Marie Curie Fellow in emerging technology for global impact at the European Commission and Grenoble School of Management. He informed the EU policymaking to incentivize and support innovation addressing global challenges, and led strategic efforts to direct the multi-billion-euro Horizon 2020 research and innovation fund towards technologies solving grand challenges. At Grenoble School of Management and as a European Science Foundation Visiting Fellow at Bocconi University and a HEPTech Visiting Fellow at GSI and CERN, he conducted research on technology innovation for global impact. As a result, he inspired and helped CERN to build Collaboration Spotting, a data analytics platform that facilitates the technology transfer from science labs and companies to society, which CERN features among its success stories.
Andrea served as the AEGEE Representative at the United Nations, where he created a multi-stakeholder initiative within the UN Rio+20 process and advocated for the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Secretary-General's first ever Envoy on Youth role. He also helped shape Future Earth, a global sustainability research and innovation initiative announced at the UN Rio+20 Summit, and funded by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, NASA, NSF, the European Space Agency, and several universities, academies, foundations, and governments around the world.
As a public speaker, Andrea has contributed to summits and conferences hosted by institutions such as the World Economic Forum, European Commission, Expo, The Economist, and the UN, and his work and ideas have been featured by publications such as Reuters, NASDAQ, Fortune, Huffington Post, and Fast Company.