by Claire McGovern, Strategic Initiatives Associate, Pipeline

Geri and I met on a sunny summer morning at Le Pain Quotidien in midtown. Over coffee, we discussed her career pipeline as the Founder of Ventureneer.com, an online education and peer support community. Among her many roles, she takes great pride in her work as a mentor. “I play more of a coaching role,” she noted. As a mentor, Geri works with the TBL Incubator (formally the NYWSE Incubator), Columbia Business School, and NYU Stern School of Business. For Geri, it’s important that her mentees think through their problems themselves. Cultivating a woman innovator requires a mentor to actively listen and provide feedback, and Geri happily fills that need.

Does she identify with the term “woman innovator”? She had to think about her definition first. Is she entrepreneurial? Yes. Starting a business where no one has gone before? Check. Concentrating in social innovation and corporate responsibility? Oh, yeah. Geri said, “I didn’t think that I fit into it, but as I put my own definition to it I said, ‘Yeah, I am a woman innovator. Yeah, I am!”

Claire McGovern is Pipeline’s Strategic Initiatives Associate. Her responsibilites include managing Pipeline’s social media presence, content creation, and producing the #womaninnovator series. Claire’s posts will document her summer at Pipeline and her observatinos as she navigates through her own personal pipeline.