Elaine is an award-winning educator and a corporate entrepreneurship consultant. A native of Hong Kong, Elaine moved to the US to study engineering at MIT, eventurally building a career as a technology entrepreneur. Her rich experience includes serving at the VP level of 6 companies, including Rethink Robotics, Zeo, Zeemote, and SensAble Technologies. She has brought numerous high tech products to market and holds 22 patents.
Since early 2011, Elaine has been working with students as a Senior Lecturer and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. She teaches entrepreneurship and corporate entrepreneurship, coaches students on a one-on-one basis, and develops systems and processes to support and scale student entrepreneurial ventures. She built the Trust Center’s First Time Founder Knowledge Base from the ground up. Elaine was instrumental in the development of Orbit, a one-stop-shop portal for MIT student entrepreneurs. She also serves on the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge. In June 2016, Elaine received the Monosson Prize for Entrepreneurship Mentoring from MIT. In 2017, she was selected by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and the Lemelson Foundation to serve as one of eight Invention Ambassadors for 2017-2018.
Elaine has leveraged her extensive experience in higher education, startup leadership, and high tech product development to build Conceptspring, a corporate entrepreneurship consulting business. Conceptspring helps leaders make their organization more entrepreneurial by providing innovation enablement consulting and entrepreneurial training services. Clients span diverse industries, including healthcare IT, industrial automation, robotics, consumer electronics, retail innovation, FinTech, government, and more.
Elaine is a thought leader, author, and keynote speaker who has been featured in Xconomy, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Forbes and Fortune. She is the author of the book, Bringing a Hardware Product to Market: Navigating the Wild Ride from Concept to Mass Production. She covers topics spanning corporate innovation and entrepreneurship, technology trends, and more. Her recent speaking engagements include speaking about corporate entrepreneurship at an innovation symposium in Paris; discussing innovation at a conference on Public-Private Partnership hosted by the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland; and delivering a keynote address for an International Tourism Innovation Conference in Portugal. She has extensive international experience, particularly in the Asia-Pacific area.
Elaine holds a BS and an MS in mechanical engineering from MIT. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters.
