Craig Warren Smith (Founder of the Digital Partners Movement)

Craig Warren Smith,  PhD,  is a professor, consultant and author who is an expert in public/private partnership in the digital economy.  In 2002 he held a joint appointment at Harvard University’s Center for International Development and MIT Media Lab and in that year was Visiting Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 2003,  he was appointed Visiting Scholar with Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies.  For many years, he has advised leading philanthropists, governments and corporations, foundations, and intergovernmental agencies.  Though these clients are disparate, all the assignments have focused on positioning these institutions as leaders in innovative efforts to solve social problems of a global nature. For Microsoft,  in a 1997-98 full time assignment,  he helped Bill Gates and other executives set Microsoft’s worldwide policies towards nonprofit organizations and emerging markets. For the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 2001 he advised the creation of the United National Task for on Information Technology, chaired by Kofi Annan, and has since been a policy advisor to UNESCO in Paris.  In 2000-2003,  for Harvard and MIT,  he established an interdisciplinary project called “Financial Solution to the Digital Divide,” supported by a spectrum of  IT professors and researchers in both institutions, which establishes the “investor case” for closing digital divide. He is the former director of the Global Corporate Citizenship Program of The Conference Board,  a major business think tank.  Since 1996,  he has been a Fellow of the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy and he advises the World Bank’s Business Partners in Development program. As founder and publisher of Corporate Philanthropy Report, 1984-1995,  he helped to define the management practices of corporate citizenship and has written articles for Harvard Business Review on that theme.   In 1999,  he founded Digital Partners a worldwide leader in the field of social entrepreneurship.  His work on social issues has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation,  Kellogg Foundation and Open Society Institute.   He spends much of his time in Asia, serving recently as consultant to Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry and Australia’s aid agency,  Ausaid, and lecturing at National University of Singapore. In 2003, he established a research project at Singapore’s Institute of Policy Studies, directed by Ambassador-at-Large Tommy Koh, which  promoted public/private partnerships in Asia’s dynamic wireless sector.  He has written four books, most recently (2002),  Digital Corporate Citizenship:  The Business Response to the Digital Divide (University of Indiana.)   His academic degrees are from Stanford University,  University of California-Berkeley, and Brandeis University. He  serves on various nonprofit boards.  In various volunteer assignments, he is engaged in efforts to integrate meditation practices into social action strategies.    Since 1974 he has taught meditation,  sponsored by Shambhala International,  a Buddhist organization.  He also serves on boards of nonprofit organizations that promote “engaged Buddhism,”  notably the (Richard) Gere Foundation and Garrison Institute