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The Play Alchemist
Jessica Matthews (AB 2010, MBA 2014) and her inventions have drawn a lot of attention. Former president Bill Clinton said she’s “quite extraordinary, really; if ever there was an innovator, she’s it.” Talk-show host Stephen Colbert called one of her inventions—the Soccket, a soccer ball that generates electricity as it rolls—“[a] project that makes the world a better place.”
Cofounder and CEO of Uncharted Play, a company based in New York City that creates a line of socially beneficial play-based products, she was on Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30” list in 2014 and was named Black Enterprise’s Innovator of the Year in 2013. The year before that she was chosen Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation and in 2011 was named one of the “10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs” by Fortune. All this by the time she turned 27.
Her high profile—she also is Ambassador of Entrepreneurship for Nigeria, to which she holds dual citizenship—means she is becoming a role model to many people.
“I'm more and more conscious of that,” she says. “It’s becoming much more obvious, not just because I'm a woman but because I'm a woman of color. What I do does matter in that way.”
Despite the attention, Matthews remains focused on new ideas and new opportunities to bring change to people who need it. “It truly is a question of, How do you execute on this invention? What do you have to do to make it come to life and reach the people you need to reach so that it can have a meaningful impact?” she asks. “To me, that's where business comes in. If you want to create a meaningful impact with your ideas, you have to be able to devise a system that can allow your product or service to reach as many people as possible in a sustainable way.”
(Published September 2015)
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