Strengthening Incubators and Accelerators across Asia Pacific

Lily is a Senior Advisor in the Gender Investment and Innovation Department at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF), one of the largest philanthropic organizations in Asia. As a founding team member of the Asia Women Impact Fund, an initiative to invest up to US $ 100 million from the Foundation to pursue gender lens investments that achieve favorable outcomes for women in Southeast Asia, she currently leads research and program design to advance gender equality, women’s entrepreneurship, angel investments, and inclusive business development in the region.

She was a Fellow of the University of Tokyo and holds a PhD in Neuroscience from University College London, UK. She has completed courses on impact measurements and applications of behavioral economics to policy design at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.

Will is an Engagement Manager and Design Lead at SecondMuse. He leads design and delivery of innovative development programs across the Asia Pacific region. This involves developing strategy, coordinating remote teams, facilitating collaboration, and managing projects.

Will draws on experience as a facilitator, strategist, designer, and manager. His work has all focused on social impact and innovation, but has covered both community and international development. This has ranged from the co-design of social services with communities in regional Australia, to cross-sector policy and system design, to the implementation of global programs focused on sustainable development. Behind this diverse body of work are processes that help groups to think more creatively and critically, and to work in more collaborative and adaptive ways. Putting these into practice – and through this developing new ways of thinking and working – is what drives Will, as he believes fundamentally different approaches are required: The same thinking that created the complex problems we are facing isn’t going to deliver solutions.

Stephanie works with SecondMuse, a network-centered innovation agency that works around the world within the public, private and civil society sectors to identify the systemic causes of issues, opportunities where new action will have the biggest impact, and design and coordinate collaborative efforts to implement change.

Prior to joining SecondMuse, Stephanie co-founded Impact Hub Jakarta, a coworking space and innovation hub that is part of a 100+ strong global network and curated the ASEAN Conference on Social Entrepreneurship, the first gathering of its kind in the region fostering collaboration among countries and sectors towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey is a Regional Director at ygap, an international development non profit that backs local impact ventures across Africa, Asia and the Pacific. To date, ygap has run 45 accelerator programs and supported 515 impact ventures, which have gone on to improve the lives of over 950,000 people living in Poverty.

Audrey joined ygap from muru-D, an accelerator that invests in and supports early stage technology ventures across the Asia Pacific region. Through her work at ygap and muru-D, Audrey has supported over 200 early stage ventures globally. She also leads the gender work at ygap. This includes the development and delivery of their female-focused accelerator programs as well as the development of the Frontier Incubators’ Gender Lens in Incubation and Acceleration toolkit.