Melanie Edwards
Adjunct Professor, Social Entrepreneurship
Columbia Business School & Stanford;
Founder & Board Chair
Mobile Metrix;
Senior Portfolio Advisor
Echoing Green
Melanie educates the next generation of impact leaders for social and environmental change. As an adjunct professor at Stanford University and Columbia Business School, she instructs and advises undergraduate and graduate students in developing their impact ventures, careers and leadership. As senior portfolio advisor with Echoing Green, Melanie coaches global Climate Change Fellows on their award-winning ventures.
Melanie founded the social venture Mobile Metrix, an inclusive market research company serving marginalized populations. By hiring local young adults to collect data on needs and impact in their own communities using handheld technology, life-saving products are more effectively designed for and channeled to hard-to-reach people. While under her leadership as CEO, Mobile Metrix was selected by Cannes Lions Innovation as one of the world’s “Top 50 companies innovating the future of marketing and market research”. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, PopTech Fellow, Social Capitalist (SoCap) Social Entrepreneur, AVINA Leader, PBS NewsHour Agent for Change and Fast Company Innovation Agent. Melanie was also a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University and a social entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Previous to CEO of Mobile Metrix, Melanie worked in management with J.P. Morgan, International Data Group (IDG), and as an executive of key accounts at AT&T. She launched the Global Technology Corps, a “digital Peace Corps,” with the US Department of State and co-created the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS). She is also a Return Peace Corps Volunteer from Togo, Africa.
Melanie was raised on a fourth-generation family farm in the rural Midwest, graduated magna cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis and received her master’s from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston.