Design & IT Manager
Robert Shaw has extensive international experience as a digital strategist and innovator with wide-ranging experience across the information technology, telecommunications and Internet sectors. He is passionate about advancing the practice of creativity, design, innovation and entrepreneurship whether at an individual, team or organizational level.
With more than 30 years of international experience in the United Nations system – working in more than 60 countries – he was most recently Head of Innovation at a UN specialized agency for information and communication technologies and based in Geneva, Switzerland. In that role, he led initiatives on innovation, design thinking and entrepreneurship for the United Nations family and its member states. Besides advising governments on how to build national innovation capabilities and his work with youth and young entrepreneurs, he founded ITU Academy, a global face-to-face and online training initiative for building skills in entrepreneurship and information and communication technologies in over 120 locations around the globe.
He has facilitated numerous innovation workshops and headed the UN project in 2013 that produced the first crowdsourced contribution to the United Nations General Assembly in support of youth, young entrepreneurs and social innovators. He has acted as an expert in numerous fora, including for the World Economic Forum, World Bank Group, OECD, UNESCO, WIPO, Interpol, the European Commission, ISO and the G20. Mr. Shaw has spoken at numerous conferences and authored papers, including authoring a chapter in the Global Innovation Index.
He has a Masters in Business and Telecommunications from the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. He has also been trained in Design Thinking at Stanford University's d.School in Palo Alto, California and the Design Thinkers Academy in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.