Emory Innovators, brought to you by The Hatchery, Emory Center for Innovation, showcases conversations with Emory faculty, staff, and alumni who work in innovation and entrepreneurship, or have taken innovative approaches to designing their careers and disrupting their industries. This week we will be speaking Meaghan Kennedy, MPH.Meaghan’s experience intersects innovation, public health, and social entrepreneurship. After an epidemiology research career at CDC, she founded Orange Sparkle Ball, an innovation and impact consultancy that accelerates initiatives in the private and public sector and works with both domestic and global partners. With an acceleration methodology rooted in design thinking, Orange Sparkle Ball focuses on external or open innovation, innovation program design, social entrepreneurship and community activation. Meaghan has taught at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has been a guest reviewer at Georgia Tech since 2007, a judge and mentor for the Global Social Venture Competition and Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA), a mentor for social entrepreneurs and is frequently invited to sit on innovation and entrepreneurial panels.

This week we are excited to welcome alumna Quinn O’Briant to the show. Quinn is a graduate of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, where she earned a BA in Religion before going on to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and Master of Liberal Arts from Stanford University. She worked at Google, as both Content Writer & Strategist and Senior Content Strategist, before founding O’Briant Group, a boutique consulting and training firm headquartered in Atlanta. Grounded in the methods of Design Thinking, they offer an array of custom services including innovation labs, visioning sessions, tools training, and leadership experiences, and are a proud partner of Google Cloud, Google for Education, and Grow with Google.”

This week we’re excited to welcome Stacey Epstein, 91C. Stacey is the Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at ServiceMax and a go-to-market expert—having served as the first head of marketing at both ServiceMax and SuccessFactors when each was a small startup. At SuccessFactors, Stacey helped lead the team from $10m to over $150m in revenue, and was instrumental in the company’s IPO in 2007 and subsequent acquisition by SAP. At ServiceMax, Stacey joined the founding team at less than $1m in ARR and lead the marketing function through 6 years of triple-digit growth, departing just prior to the $1b acquisition by GE. Most recently Stacey was CEO of Zinc, a real-time communication app for field service workers, which was acquired by ServiceMax in 2019. In addition to graduating from Emory College in 1991 as an English major, Stacey was a four-time all-conference soccer player. She is a fierce advocate for women and parents in the workplace, and has published numerous articles in Fast Company, Recode, Fortune, and Forbes, among others. Her writings can be found at staceyepstein.com.

In this episode, we welcome our first alumnus guest to the show. Chris Hjelm is a graduate of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School (Bachelor’s in Business Administration, 2010) and a Partner in Connetic Ventures, where he serves as the Chicago Office Lead and Head of Data. Chris ran his short-focused prop trading firm out of the Connetic Office for three years until his wife decided he should lower his blood pressure by investing in start-ups instead. Prior to trading, Chris worked in various data analytics roles creating and selling custom analytic solutions. In his latest data role, Chris stood up a data practice for an e-commerce specific consulting company.