2011 Ashoka Globalizer Vienna Panelists

Jack has worked with Ashoka as a volunteer since 2003, based from his home in Miami, Florida. He does interviews of Fellow candidates as part of Ashoka’s five-step search and selection process and has interviewed more than two hundred fellow candidates. He helped started the People team at Ashoka in 2004, has helped in recruiting and partnership building in Latin America and served as Ashoka Ombudsman.

Before joining Ashoka, Jack worked for Cummins Inc. as the President of its Power Generation Group with more than US $1 billion in sales and fifteen thousand employees. During his thirty years with Cummins, Jack lived and worked in Mexico, Brazil, US and England. Jack was deeply involved in Cummins’ corporate social responsibility initiatives and he started a school for 700 children in Sao Paulo, Brazil; helped start a carpentry business for blind people in Mexico which now employs 100 people and a Women’s Engineering College in Pune, India which now has 1000 students.

Andreas Heinecke, is the founder and CEO of Dialogue Social Enterprise Ltd. He is the first Ashoka Fellow in Western Europe, Schwab Fellow and member of the Global Agenda Council on Social Entrepreneurship of the World Economic Forum. Andreas is a recipient of various international awards, holds a phD in Philosophy and leads as a professor the Danone Chair for Social Business at the European Business School. 

The core business of DSE is to employ disabled people on a global scale and to organize exhibitions and business workshops. The flagship is “Dialogue in the Dark”, a pitch-dark exhibition, in which blind guides lead visitors in small groups of visitors through rooms replicating nature and a city or take them on a boat trips and end up for a drink in a bar, all in the dark. Through a social franchise system “Dialogue in the Dark” could create work for 7.000 blind people in 34 countries and erode the social borders of more than 7 million people. The business workshops were held at high prestigious summits as the World Economic Forum in Davos and leverages social and human capital for global corporations. 14 permanent hubs are currently in Europe, the Middle East, USA and Asia. 

Nihar is an Executive Editor and Director at the Patrika Group, amongst the top 10 media houses of India, the group has developed a special penchant for unique citizen participation along with its credible and dynamic journalistic practices. Nihar holds a Master’s Degree in Economics and is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and Media Management Centre, Northwestern University, Illinois. He is associated with Pratham Rajasthan, a social initiative for education, Chairs Rupayan, an organization working in area of folk music and culture and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations on their boards.  Is associated with a number of other organisations in different areas of work including disability, youth, education, sports, arts, etc. in the past he was heading the Indian office of AIESEC and was part of their global strategy team.

Patrika Group is one of the largest media houses in India owning newspapers, cable networks, electronic media, radio stations, outdoor media, event management, education, mobile publishing, web publishing, publication, yellow pages etc.  The flagship Rajasthan Patrika and Patrika one of the largest circulated Hindi dailies of India with 28 print locations across the country. Patrika is the widely read newspaper with a daily circulation of almost 2.4 million copies with readership of over 20 million. It is among the top five most-read Hindi daily newspapers of India. The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has ranked Rajasthan Patrika as the 29th largest newspaper in the world. Patrika has figured among the top five successful Asian Community Newspapers in a survey conducted by AMIC, Singapore for UNESCO.