Top 100 Global Innovators

Rob Cox is the Global Editor of Reuters Breakingviews in New York City. Rob is an entrepreneurial journalist who co-founded and built a financial commentary website, Breakingviews.com, which was sold to Thomson Reuters in 2009. Rob has worked as a journalist in the United States, UK, Italy, and Japan and travels extensively to meet business leaders, government officials and investors worldwide.

At Reuters, Rob oversees an award-winning team of columnists in New York, London, Hong Kong, Madrid, Beijing, Singapore, Chicago, Washington and Mumbai. Four years after founding Breakingviews in London in 2000, Rob spearheaded its expansion in the United States and edited daily columns in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Breakingviews columns continue to appear in influential newspapers globally.

Rob appears frequently on CNBC and MSNBC and frequently moderates panels at gatherings including the World Economic Forum. Rob also hosts The Exchange, a talk show on Reuters.com featuring authors, politicians and business leaders. Rob has received numerous journalism accolades, including the Reuters Journalist of the Year award. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, New York, Fortune, USA Today and Wall Street Journal.

Rob is a graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism and the University of Vermont, where he was awarded the 2014 Alumni Achievement Award for his work founding the non-profit Sandy Hook Promise Foundation following the school shooting in his hometown of Newtown, Connecticut. Last year, Rob was named social entrepreneur of the year for his work on preventing gun violence by the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Jean-Francois "Jeff" Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most established seed VC firms in Silicon Valley, having closed 150 investments since 2004. An early angel investor in Web 2.0, Jeff and his team have backed successful startups like Mint (Intuit), Kongregate (GameStop), Brightroll, Milo (eBay), Wildfire (Google), Bleacher Report (Turner), Fitbit, Eventbrite, Sendgrid, Poshmark, Hired, Postmates and Vungle. The portfolio has also seen acquisitions by Groupon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL. The firm is currently investing out of its $85M Fund IV, making 16 commitments of $850K per year in mobile/cloud saas, consumer hardware, marketplaces and healthcare IT.

Born, raised and educated in France, Jeff graduated with a MS in Computer Science and a degree in Distributed Computing. He joined Effix, a financial services startup, as one of the initial developers while still at school and eventually led it as CTO. After 5 years, Reuters acquired the company and Jeff expanded his remit to several product and development organizations in Europe and the USA. In 2000, he moved to Silicon Valley as General Partner for RVC, the $450M venture fund affiliated with Reuters.

In 2004, Jeff left RVC to start SoftTech VC and invest in the early pioneers of Consumer Internet. Within a couple of years, he was being recognized in the media as one of the “super angels”, and in 2007, he subsequently raised one of the first micro-VC funds, $15M Fund II. After three years, and 60+ investments closed on his own, Jeff built a team and raised a larger, $55M Fund III that invested in 55 companies. In June 2014, the firm celebrated its 10-year anniversary, its move to San Francisco and the close of Fund IV.

One of the early VC bloggers in 2004, Jeff is now a popular conference speaker and social media/TV commentator. When he is not spending time with SoftTech's portfolio companies, Jeff enjoys traveling, skiing, scuba diving, collecting wine and hanging out with friends and family.

Dr. Michael Karasick, Vice President Innovations, oversees the Research and Development of technologies and products for Watson, including Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Discovery and Analytics. Karasick manages a unique combination of Researchers and Engineers committed to developing cognitive technologies and products that are transformational for IBM and for our customers.

Prior to this Karasick was Vice President Software; Vice President and Lab Director of IBM Research - Almaden; and Research Software Strategy leader, overseeing scientists and engineers performing exploratory and applied research worldwide. Prior to his Research role, Karasick was VP of Business and Technical Strategy for IBM's Software business in Somers, NY. He led technical initiatives spanning all IBM Software brands encompassing key industry and horizontal standards work, Linux support and IBM platform workload optimization. Before moving to New York, Karasick was for three years Director of Development for Lotus-China - responsible for products such as Lotus Symphony. He has also been the Lotus Director of Development for Client Platforms and Technologies, where he was responsible for the Lotus Expeditor product as well as the Lotus mobility products and technical direction. Before moving to China, Karasick was the IBM development director responsible for embedded software development and sensor solutions.

Karasick has served as CTO and Director of Architecture for IBM's Pervasive Computing Division, leading the design and evolution of middleware and device software. He has also led the Pervasive Computing Systems and Software team at TJ Watson Research Center, focusing on hardware design, system development, cognitive psychology and usability, user interface design, speech, and middleware. Karasick's early career in Research included a senior manager role in Software Development Technology; an IBM assignment at Sematech, where he led a multi-company effort to produce a system for simulating semiconductor manufacturing logistics; work in the areas of robotics and geometric modeling and robotics, shortly after joining IBM Research in 1988.

Karasick has published numerous papers in the areas of software engineering, geometric modeling, programming languages and compilers and pervasive computing. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE. He received an Honors B.S. from the University of Manitoba, MS from McGill University, and PhD from McGill and Cornell Universities, all in Computer Science. Karasick is an IBM Master Inventor.

Dr. Peter Lee is Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research. He manages Microsoft's worldwide research operations, comprising twelve laboratories and over 1,000 researchers, engineers, and support personnel dedicated to advancing the state of the art in computing and creating new technologies for Microsoft's products and services. Prior to joining Microsoft, Lee held key positions in both government and academia, most recently at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he founded and directed a major technology office that supported research in computing and related areas in the social and physical sciences. Prior to DARPA, Lee served as head of Carnegie Mellon University's nationally top-ranked computer science department. He also served as the university's vice provost for research.

Lee has shown executive-level leadership in world-class research organizations spanning academia, government, and industry. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves the research community at the national level, including policy contributions to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and membership on both the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and the Advisory Council of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He was the former chair of the Computing Research Association and has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee.

Lee holds a Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and bachelor's degrees in mathematics and computer sciences, also from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Tom has a distinguished 30-year career in the enterprise software market. Prior to Cloudera, his most recent role was as vice president and general manager of enterprise security at HP. Previous to HP, Tom served as CEO of enterprise security company ArcSight, which HP acquired in 2010. Tom led ArcSight through a successful initial public offering and subsequent sale to HP. Before ArcSight, Tom was vice president of business information services for IBM, following the acquisition of Trigo Technologies Inc., a master data management (MDM) software company, where he had served as CEO. Tom currently serves as a Board Member for Jive Software, privately held Ombud Inc., ThreatStream Inc. and Cloudera. Tom graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering.

AnnaLee (Anno) Saxenian is Dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Information, which offers graduate-level, cross-disciplinary degrees in information management (Doctorate and Masters of Information Management and Systems) and data science (Master of Information and Data Science.) Her scholarship focuses on regional economies and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity.

Saxenian is author of the internationally acclaimed Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994). Her latest book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2006) explores how skilled immigrants from Silicon Valley have transferred the institutions of technology entrepreneurship to emerging regions in their home countries. She has published widely in journals of economic geography, regional economic development, and industrial change. She holds a PhD from MIT, a Master's from U.C. Berkeley, and a BA from Williams College.