Gina Lucarelli

Lecturer in Engineering Sciences, SEAS

Gina Lucarelli built and stewards the world’s largest social innovation lab network on sustainable development through the United Nations Development Programmes Accelerator Labs, 91 social innovation labs embedded in the United Nations Development Programme. A systems thinker, designer, and fixer, she leads, learns from, and creates space for experiments that tackle complex development problems and the new categories and opportunities they create. She has focused her human rights and sustainable development work on Asia, Eastern Europe, and most recently Africa. She writes, talks about, and is always looking for ways to tap into collective intelligence, learn from grassroots knowledge, and drive continuous R&D to transform the systems that will determine whether future generations will be able to meet their development needs. Her speaking engagements include the School of International Futures, States of Change, Future of Good, Fwd50, MIT, Harvard Engineering and Design, Harvard Business School, and the Oxford University Rhodes Forum for Technology. Her work has been acknowledged in Apolitical’s Public Service Team of the Year in 2019, covered in the MIT Sloan Review (Summer 2020), analyzed as a Harvard Business School Case Study  (Fall 2022), and depicted in For Tomorrow, an award winning documentary on grassroots innovation available on Amazon Prime (Release date September 16th, 2022).