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View a recording of the 2022 Black Innovation and Entrepreneurship program, part two: “Invest in ideas.” This event features:
3 p.m. Welcome
3:03 p.m. Leadership greeting
3:10 p.m. Using your creativity to create generational wealth
4 p.m. Fireside chat: Executive leadership, funding opportunities for minority owned businesses, and entrepreneurship
4:25 p.m. Closing
Ebonique Boyd is the cofounder of Budget Collector, a company dedicated to helping every American purchase original art for their home by utilizing machine learning. Her previous startup, Good Management & Investments, helped underserved entrepreneurs connect with resources and opportunities. The Good Management & Investments partnered with the U.S. Small Business Administration to be the regional decision maker for the InnovateHER grant.
Stacy Brown-Philpot is the former CEO of TaskRabbit and has 20 years of consumer technology experience, leading the growth and scale of large and small enterprises in the digital economy. During her tenure, Brown-Philpot built a fast-growing startup into a global business, charting the course in a new industry and launching local operations in more than 100 major markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain.
In 2017, Brown-Philpot led the successful acquisition of TaskRabbit by the IKEA Group. In addition to shaping the future of work, TaskRabbit is now a core driver of the e-commerce and services strategy for the world’s largest furniture retailer with the mission of making everyday life easier for everyone. Prior to joining the company, she spent nearly a decade at Google heading online sales and operations.
Brown-Philpot is a founding member of SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund, a $100 million venture fund established to invest in Black, Latinx, and Native American entrepreneurs. She is also on the Board of Directors for HP Inc., Nordstrom, Noom, StockX, Black Girls Code, and The Urban Institute. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School of Business and an MBA from Stanford University. Brown-Philpot lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters.
Tani Chambers is an entrepreneur, investor and the Founder and CEO of RAVN, an investment education platform and global community of 30,000 emerging Black women investors. Her entrepreneurship endeavors and professional career in technology, finance, and marketing span over 20 years at some of the prominent financial institutions and leading marketing agencies in the U.S. After recognizing how severely impacted Black women are by the investing gap, she created RAVN, a collaborative learning and investment platform designed to educate, equip, and empower its members to use investing as a wealth-building vehicle.
Chambers and her ventures have been featured in: Bloomberg, Businessweek, WIRED Money, Morning Consult, Yahoo! Finance, ABC, CW, The Wall Street Journal, Black Enterprise, BET, New York Magazine, and more. She is a fierce advocate and believes that education and equitable policies are the key to combating economic inequalities like the gender and racial wealth gaps.
Deputy Commissioner Robin Evans provides executive leadership to quality related offices in charge of training, quality assurance, process improvement, and stakeholder outreach.
Evans began her career at the USPTO as a patent examiner focused on applications in the mechanical area. She served as a supervisory patent examiner in the areas of electrical heating technology and the fluid handling technologies. She also served as a management quality assurance specialist in related fields.
Evans was selected as the first regional manager of the first USPTO regional office in Detroit, Michigan. She was then appointed to the Senior Executive Service as a director of Technology Center 2800. Shortly after being appointed, Evans served as the interim director of the Rocky Mountain Regional Office in Denver, Colorado. Prior to her present role, Evans was serving as Acting Associate Commissioner for Patent Quality.
Evans holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland.
James Howard is a lecturer, design historian, and industrial designer/inventor of more than 300 products with over 18 patents. He is currently the owner/operator of Entrepreneurial U, a specialty private career school of Design Thinking. One of his courses, “Bridge” Exploring New Career Pathways, takes students through the problem-solving processes: problem/necessity, solution, and execution, and leads them to new career pathways and job opportunities.
While teaching for more than 20 years at County College of Morris in New Jersey, Professor Howard was an owner/operator of the award-winning firm Howard Design, an industrial design practice, whose clients included Coca-Cola, Colgate Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, Nabisco, Pfizer, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Howard serves as the Executive Director of Black Inventors Hall of Fame, a virtual museum devoted to immortalizing African Americans whose noteworthy inventions have improved lives, yet have gone unnoticed. Howard also serves on the Board of Directors for the Unites States Intellectual Property Alliance, and he worked with the National Inventors Hall of Fame® to curate the new “Breaking Barriers: Honoring Extraordinary Black Inventors” exhibit located in the USPTO’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.
For four years, Howard has served as a subject matter expert on design thinking for the Keller Innovation Center at Princeton University. He is also a visiting lecturer for the University of Texas Center for Integrated Design. Howard earned a Master and Bachelor of Fine Arts-Industrial Design at University of Illinois, Urbana. He was recently awarded Honorary Member of the National Academy Of Inventors.
Jayde V. Stewart is part of the team that coordinates the USPTO’s active partnerships with the National Inventors Hall of Fame, National Academy of Inventors, National Science and Technology Medals Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, and other outreach partners. She develops reports related to multiple Joint Project Agreements and Memoranda of Understanding under the agency’s National Outreach Partnerships team. Stewart works closely with these partners to organize events, competitions, award nominations, and other projects that support the mission and strategic direction of the USPTO and is part of the team that administers the selection process for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement.
James O. Wilson, Assistant Regional Director of the Elijah J. McCoy Midwest Regional Office, has been an employee of the USPTO since January of 1989. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from Howard University in 1984 and Master of Science degree in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Michigan in 1987.
Wilson has served on the Executive Board of the Patent and Trademark Office Society and continues to be an active member of the organization. As a primary examiner, Wilson served as a Chemical Representative in the Patent Office Professional Association. Wilson became a supervisory patent examiner (SPE) in Technical Center 1600 in 2002. In 2007, Wilson served as a managerial detailee in the Office of the Commissioner for Patents.
Over the years, SPE Wilson has been an instructor for several classes in the Patent Examiner Initial Training Program and has served as a SPE Instructor in the Office of Patent Training. Wilson has also had the distinction of serving as an Acting Director in Technology Center 1600 from November 2013 through March 2014, as well as the Acting Director of the Elijah J. McCoy Midwest Regional Office from October 2018 through September 2019.
This program is presented by the USPTO’s Office of Innovation Outreach. For more information, please contact BlackInnovation@uspto.gov.
The content and opinions shared by our guest speakers during this program are not those of the USPTO, nor are an endorsement of any persons, products, programs, or policies mentioned therein.
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