Jackie Stenson

Overview

Jackie is CEO and co founder of Essmart a distribution company for life improving technologies in southern India. An engineer by training Jackie wanted to design technologies that could impact low income populations around the world. After working with technology for development initiatives in 11 African countries and India over multiple years she realized that the real challenge is getting these products to their intended end users. She shifted her focus to technology dissemination and wrote her Master's thesis on innovation diffusion strategies in low income settings which helped lay the groundwork for Essmart. Jackie received awards for outstanding scholarly work for both her undergraduate and masters dissertations and she continues to give lectures on technology design commercialization and dissemination at Harvard MIT and Yale. Jackie studied mechanical engineering at Harvard and Engineering for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge.