The forthcoming two-day Business Innovation Forum "Armenia - 20.18" organized by the Union ofInformation Technology Enterprises (UITE) is a platform for knowledge sharing and practical solutions discussions among the local and international experts of the high-tech and related industries. The key topic of the discourse is the positioning of Armenia among the 20 most innovative countries in the world. 

The Business Innovation Forum is expecting to host over 200 participants from the leading sectors of Armenia and abroad, such as local and international high-tech companies and other industries, state agencies, educational institutions, diplomatic missions, financial institutions, business agencies, consulting firms, international organizations, entrepreneurs, media, and etc. For more detailed, informative and comprehensive discussions the representatives of the Government of the Republic of Armenia, as well as IT sector, are supposed to participate.

Within two working days in the frames of each direction, there will be keynote speakers, moderators, thematic speeches, and discussions held. For more detailed, informative and comprehensive discussions the representatives of the Government of the Republic of Armenia, as well as IT sector are expected to participate.

Participants

The Business Innovation Forum is expecting to host over 200 participants from the leading sectors of Armenia and abroad, such as local and international high-tech companies and other industries, state  agencies, educational institutions, diplomatic missions, financial institutions, business agencies,  consulting firms, international organizations, entrepreneurs, media, and etc. For more detailed,  informative and comprehensive discussions the representatives of the Government of the Republic of Armenia, as well as IT sector, are supposed to participate.

Elena Donets

Elena Donets is a leading figure in the Israeli Entrepreneurship Scene and entrepreneur at heart!

As StarTAU’s CEO She travels internationally to mentor, advise and lecture at Universities on how to build their Entrepreneurial Eco- System, cultivating and motivating student communities to take their first steps into the entrepreneurial world.

Elena holds great experience in working and advising large corporates in how to create Innovation centers and acceleration programs in order to develop connections with the local business community. Such connections help improve branding and marketing strategies and assists them to create new circles of followers.

In addition, as Co -Founder & COO at StartIsrael, Israel’s Entrepreneurship Portal, Elena manages all the operations including: design and development, content management, business development and marketing strategies.

Tigran Jrbashyan

Mr. Tigran Jrbashyan is а member of Management Board of Ameria bank and Development Director. He has more than 20 years of experience in management, coordination and implementation of large to small scale projects for state, donor and private clients. He is one of the leading experts in Armenia in the fields of strategy development, elaboration of sectorial reform packages, elaboration of legal normative acts and implementation of institutional building activities. During his very diverse career he gained reputation of highly skilled, knowledgeable and reliable project manager. He has designed and implemented solutions that have significantly improved performance of the companies by appropriately exploiting enterprise resources, skills and capabilities of human resources as well as increasing efficiency/designing business processes. He has proven skills in management of large project implementation teams and problem solving skills. He is the author of over 130 scientific articles and publications on institutional economics, industrial economics, development of investment and financial markets, development of trade policy, theory of macroeconomics, integration of Armenia into EU, membership of Armenia to WTO, etc., published in local and international magazines and journals.

Marina Mkhitaryan

Marina Mkhitaryan is a development professional with more than 15 years experience managing development programs, media outlets and NGOs.

Marina has a dual degree in Philology and Law from the Yerevan State University. She has also completed a mid-career course on International Law and Legal Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University, US). Since 2011 Marina is the Country Coordinator of Armenian and International Social Innovation Camps. She has designed and managed the InfoVillage national network of community-based telecommunication centers and injected innovation and new tools in the traditionally low-tech development interventions. 

Vahagn Poghosyan

Vahagn started his career in high-tech in 1999 Silicon Valley-based EDA startup. In 2003 he received his PhD degree in the field of applied mathematics. Since 2004 together with Enno Wein he founded Instigate – a high-tech incubator and research center based in Yerevan, Armenia. During past 10 years Instigate has spun off multiple SW and HW startups in more than 10 cities of Armenia, Georgia, Germany, Silicon Valley. Since 2007 Vahagn co-founded multiple initiatives targeting improvement of education, with primary focus on IT and Robotics, but also including Arts & Crafts, as well as Sports and Culture. The primary topics of interest for Instigate currently are: Web 3.0 (GGG) technologies and semantical networks; the 3d-printers, CNC machines, UAV and robotics in general; video coding, image processing, AI-augmented applications for security, surveillance and media streaming.

Matt Bartelsian

For almost 20 years Matt has helped build local, regional, and global strategies for some of the world’s most powerful brands. While based in New York, Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai, Warsaw, and Yerevan, Matt has worked with clients such as PicsArt, Monitis, eBay, Monster, Travelocity, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes Benz, HSBC, The Four Seasons Hotels, Westin Hotels, among others.

Matt is currently based in Yerevan, Armenia where he lives with his wife and four children.  He is also the Director of Business Development & Partnerships for Volo and VoloMobile, one of Armenia’s leading innovation outsourcing companies.

Manuk Hergnyan

Manuk Hergnyan has over 15 years experience in consulting, management and entrepreneurship. He is a co-founder and managing partner of the first venture capital firm in Armenia – Granatus Ventures that provides funding, expertise and networks to high tech start ups with core value added activities in Armenia. He is the founding chairman of the Economy and Values (EV) Research Center and the founding managing partner of EV Consulting, a management advisory company serving companies and organizations in CIS countries with offices in Moscow and Yerevan. EV is a partner institute of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness and Performance Centre.

Mr. Hergnyan holds an Executive MBA degree from Oxford University, Ph.D. from Moscow State University and MA in Economics from Yerevan State University. He has been trained in management at Cambridge (UK), Harvard (USA) and Central European Universities (Hungary). He is certified in Balanced Scorecard by The Palladium Group.

Bradley Busetto

Bradley Busetto was appointed United Nations Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative for the Republic of Armenia in February 2013.

Previously he worked with the UN World Food Programme, where served as Deputy Director in Indonesia. In his UN career he has served on the front-line of humanitarian crises in Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. He also worked at the Wellcome Trust, the leading health foundation, where he grew its global presence, especially in Asia and Africa.

The California native also worked in leading positions in the private sector, including banking and management consulting. Throughout his working life Bradley has focused on private-public partnerships, social innovation, and applying the principles of entrepreneurship to the development sector and the United Nations. Bradley holds a B.A. 

(Honors) and M.A. from Stanford University.

Raffi M. Kassarjian

Raffi M. Kassarjian, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Repat Armenia Foundation.

Raffi Kassarjian is Chair, Committee Adjoined to the Board of Converse Bank, serving as part of Mr. Eduardo Eurnekian’s Corporacion America management team in Armenia.

Mr. Kassarjian moved to Armenia in 2008 and held the positions of Chief Commercial Officer and then Chief Executive Officer of iCON Communications, one of the pioneer wireless internet service providers in the country.

Before moving to Armenia, Mr. Kassarjian was Vice President and General Manager at Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC), one of the leading solution providers in predictive analytics for financial services, telecommunications and retail.

Mr. Kassarjian holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Business Administration degrees from Stanford University. Mr. Kassarjian was a member of the Board of the Union of IT Enterprises (UITE) in Armenia, and served on the Prime Minister’s Information Technology Development Council.

Aram Hajian

Dr. Hajian received his Mechanical Engineering B.S. degree from Stanford University and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University.

After working in the Biomechanics Group at Exponent, Inc., he relocated to Armenia in 2000, where he has worked in a number of hi-tech, entrepreneurial and community positions. He has served as Executive Director of MadeinArmeniadirect.com and as a Managing Consultant at Arlex Intl. in Yerevan. He is also a co-founder and board member of the Chess Academy of Armenia. His scholarly publications are in the area of biomechanics and relate to the mechanical characterization of the human hand. He teaches several courses in the College of Science and Engineering.

Artashes Vardanyan

Artashes has joined Microsoft Innovation Center Armenia team in 2014 to design and manage the MIC startup acceleration program. Coming from the dynamic startup world Artashes brought fresh thinking and his hands-on experience in transforming innovative ideas into products. Being startup acceleration manager his aim is to connect startups with mentors and investors and share his experience and knowledge with others. He has already worked with more than 20 startups from US, UK, India, Canada and supported 4 of those startups to raise funds for their startups.

Amalya Yeghoyan

Amalya Yeghoyan has over 7 years of experience in operations management, executive business management, PR and HR Management. She started her career working as computer operator and translator interpreter in “Narek” Psychological Center. Starting from 2007, she became the Educational project coordinator and later the Academic Director in Gyumri Information Technologies Center (GITC), managing standard operational procedure development for the GITC and also monitoring the class management. In 2009 Amalya Yeghoyan worked in GITC as Deputy Executive Director, fulfilling financial and legal obligations of the Center, SOP Development, promoting conditions for effective teamwork and discipline.From March to December 2010, she served as the executive director in “MS AND A Management” LLC, supervising all the LLC related activities: trading, marketing, industry, conducting negotiations with foreign customers and founder in Australia, encouraging international businesses to Armenia.Currently, Amalya Yeghoyan is the executive director of GyumriInformation Technologies Center, a leading educational foundation of Gyumri in the Information Technology field..

Rouben Meschian

*Founder and Lead developer of client-side libraries and infrastructure at Cambridge Semantics.

* Lead developer of a pluggable application framework called Anzo Web Toolkit (AnzoWT), which was partially modeled after the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. All Anzo web-applications run on top of this framework. - Javascript, HTML5, CSS3, RDF, RDFa, SPARQL, OWL

* Lead developer of CViT, a web-based tool used to manage and facilitate the development of models to simulate multiscale cancer growth dynamics. - Java, Javascript, Dojo, SPARQL, OWL, RDF