A New Definition of Peace: Margarita Quihuis at TEDxBayArea Impact!

A social entrepreneur and mentor capitalist, Margarita Quihuis's career has focused on innovation, technology incubation, access to capital and entrepreneurship. Her accomplishments include being the first director of Astia (formerly known as the Women's Technology Cluster), a business incubator where her portfolio companies raised $67 million in venture funding, venture capitalist, Reuters Fellow at Stanford, and Director of RI Labs for Ricoh Innovations. She is currently a member of the research team at Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, and co-directs the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab where she conducts research on innovation, mass collaboration, persuasive technology & the potential of social networks to change society for the better. Her projects have included the study of collaboration and citizen engagement to foster government innovation -- Manor Labs, bottoms-up post-disaster response and recovery -- Relief 2.0 and advisory roles in citizen psy-op efforts such as the the Israel Loves Iran and Romancing the Border social media campaigns.

She is a recognized thought leader in the areas of innovation, emergent social behavior and technology and has been part of Deloitte's On Social Roundtable and Aspen Institute's Dialogue on Open Innovation and Dialogue on Diplomacy and Technology.

As Director of R I Labs for Ricoh Innovations she created a consumer focused innovation lab that focused on new market opportunities from generational behavior (Millenials), cloud and mobile computing, emerging social technologies, crowdsourcing and open innovation.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)