We are very pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Jim Spohrer and Mark Florman to our advisory board.
Based in London, Mark is Chairman & CEO of the strategic consultancy firm Time Partners Ltd., a corporate finance firm advising PE firms, LPs and portfolio companies on strategy, capital rising and value creation.
A well-known figure in the private equity industry, Mark was founder of the merchant banking group Maizels Westerberg and has since founded a number of businesses in the technology, advisory, financial services and investment sectors. He was Managing Director of the private equity firm Doughty Hanson, Chair of LM Glasfiber (the global renewable energy group) and started the African venture capital firm 8 Miles LLP with Bob Geldof. He has been active in policy ideas and campaigns related to social mobility and poverty fighting in the UK and across the world. He co-founded the Centre for Social Justice, the Early Intervention Foundation and B Labs (UK). In March 2015, he was appointed to the Board of the BBC Trust, and was the Trustee for England for two years. Mark was a member of the G8 Social Impact Investment Task Force in 2014.
Mark Florman
Mark is also a leading authority on some of the world’s most entrenched socio-economic challenges, speaking widely on reforms that must be made to drive improved governance and productivity, and always championing the power and social impact of good business. He is the author of the External Rate of Return with the London School of Economics. Mark was appointed as a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs, London School of Economics & Political Science in November 2016 and a Visiting Professor at the Policy Institute, Kings College London in January 2017.
Dr. Jim Spohrer
Based in Silicon Valley, Dr. Jim (James C.) Spohrer is Director, Cognitive OpenTech for IBM Research. Jim is a computer scientist known for having led the development of a new science of service systems, often known as service science, management and engineering.
From 2009 through 2016, Jim was the Director of IBM Global University Programs Worldwide. Between 2003 and 2009, he was the Director of Almaden Services Research with IBM at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He was a driving advocate of the service science, management and engineering initiative across companies, governments and academics. Jim’s research group received IBM awards for modeling customers and mapping global service systems including performance measures, costing and pricing of complex, inter-organizational service projects, analytics and information service innovations, process improvement methods, and innovation foresight methods, amongst others.
Jim works with service research pioneers from diverse academic disciplines and he advocates for Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED) as an integrative framework for global competency development, economic development, and advancement of science.
Jim was the Chief Technology Officer for IBM Venture Capital Relations between 2000 and 2002. He was a Distinguished Scientist in Learning Research at Apple Computer between 1989 and 1998, where he was a coinventor receiving 9 patents. Jim received a Ph.D. in Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence from Yale University in 1988. He graduated with a B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1978. Jim grew up in Newburgh, Maine, where his teachers included author Stephen King.
