Travels from San Francisco, California, USA
Jane Marie Chen's speaking fee falls within range: $10,000 to $15,000
Social entrepreneur, Jane Chen and her team have helped save the lives of 300,000 babies and counting. As a grad student at Stanford University, Chen and a few of her classmates set out to develop an incubator for premature babies at 1% of the cost of the status quo. During two years of fieldwork and iterations in rural India, they created the Embrace Incubator, which has been used by mothers in 22 developed countries to keep premature babies alive and healthy.
Along with her co-founders, Chen has received a number of accolades from the Economist Innovation Award to Fast Company’s Design Award. In 2014, she was invited to the White House to present her work to President Obama. That same year, Embrace received a donation from Beyonce to distribute the technology throughout nine African nations.
In 2016, Chen colaunched Little Lotus, a line of consumer baby sleep products which operates on a Buy-one-give-one model in conjunction with the Embrace Incubator.
Chen is a Harvard and Stanford graduate and columnist for Forbes.
JANE MARIE CHEN is a social entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of Embrace Innovations, which developed a groundbreaking baby incubator estimated to have helped over 250,000 babies in over 20 countries. More recently, Jane launched a consumer product line called Little Lotus Baby, temperature regulating baby products that have a buy-one, give-one model.
Jane has been a TED Speaker and TED Fellow; she was selected as one of Forbes’ Impact 30 and Town & Country’s 50 biggest philanthropists. She has received the Economist Innovation Award, the Fast Company Design Award, and was recognized as a Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Jane is also a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Her work has been profiled in global media, and supported by companies like Clinique, Dove, BCBG, and lululemon. The story of Embrace is documented in best-selling books, including Essentialism (by Greg McKeown) and Creative Confidence (by Tom and David Kelley, founder of IDEO).
Jane received her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and her Masters in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is an avid surfer and meditator, and speaks about topics ranging from design thinking, to innovation, to leadership and the entrprenuerial journey.
Entrepreneur and inventor, Jane Chen shares how working with mothers of premature infants in rural India transformed the way she approaches design. For two years Chen worked on the Embrace infant warmer, a special polymer blanket designed to function like an incubator, but at 1% of the cost and without the need for a constant source of electricity. After piloting the program among both health care professionals and mothers, she found that mothers utilized the warmer more effectively than anyone else. In retrospect, this made perfect sense. “Technology is only part of the solution. It is an enabler,” Chen explains. “But for technology to be effective, there must be intent from the person who is using it. No one has more intent to save a baby than a mother. This begs the question: are we designing solutions for the right people?”
Entrepreneur and designer Jane Chen imparts seasoned advice to social entrepreneurs on how they can make the most impact. From product design to structuring your organization, Chen draws from her amazing story working with Indian mothers to bring to market the Embrace infant warmer. She offers practical lessons from navigating both the nonprofit and for-profit world, examining how social enterprises can balance financial and logistic challenges while producing effective solutions to some of the world’s most formidable problems.
Using Design Thinking to Save Lives
How can you save lives? If you’re a doctor you can save one life at a time, but how can you save thousands of lives if there is just one of you? Jane Chen decided to use design thinking, a systematic process for problem-solving. By following a process of empathizing, defining, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and implementing, Jane Chen plans to help the 15 million premature and low birth-weight babies born every year through a low-cost infant warmer In this talk, Jane walks through the design thinking process and illustrates how she was able to use it at Embrace to develop an innovation that has now saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Embracing the Entrepreneurial Journey
In this talk, she walks through the process of creating Embrace, the challenges faced along the way, and key lessons she learned as an entrepreneur.
What is the Cathedral You want to Build?
People dedicate their lives to building Cathedrals that take hundreds of years to complete. They will never see their work come to finality and celebrate their accomplishment. These people work for a cause that is greater than themselves. In this talk, she walks through the process of creating Embrace, how to lead with purpose, and how to think about the purpose of your work and the legacy you want to leave
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