User:Geoffrey Groesbeck

Geoffrey A. P. Groesbeck directs, consults for, and is a board member and trustee of several successful entrepreneur-driven sustainable development initiatives throughout Latin America. These are located primarily in two areas: central and western Mexico, regions which are characterized by a high degree of technology transfer and adaptation, and eastern Bolivia (more specifically, the Chiquitania), where his work focuses primarily on the commercialization of cultural/historic patrimony, and, to a lesser extent, recyclables. He is a well-known proponent of entrepreneurship as a catalyst for social change, and rejects the distinction between "entrepreneur" and "social entrepreneur". This stance led to his decision to reject a doctorate honoris causa in 2012.

His projects in Bolivia has been cited as the first successful entrepreneurial initiatives undertaken in the Chiquitania and the first to focus on the commercialization of its unique Jesuit-Mestizo heritage. Since beginning operations in 2002, a number of locally owned enterprises have gone on to achieve success using Groesbeck's methodology. In Mexico he is best known for the landmark La Vaquita project, in which against overwhelming odds a small number of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Global Poverty Initiative established a business converting recycled plastics into fashion items and raised socioeconomic indicators in one of the country's poorest communities.

Formerly an academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mexico's Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, he is concurrently a pro bono advisor to the Mexican state of Zacatecas on economic and educational issues and a senior strategic communications consultant for State Street Global Advisors. Groesbeck continues to advise and lecture on entrepreneur-led sustainable development programs throughout Latin America and Africa.

He has written and lectured extensively on Latin American topics, in particular Bolivia's remote Chiquitania, the Chaco of Paraguay and Mexico's colonial heartland and their cultural and socioeconomic histories. Author or co-author of 12 best-selling cultural travel guides and specialist contributor to several others, his works have been translated into 12 languages. An expert on the history and social development of the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos, Groesbeck's writings have garnered considerable international coverage. He has published more materials in English on the Chiquitania than any other researcher, and is a frequently cited source on the same.

A descendant of many of the first families of New England, New York, and Canada's Maritime provinces, Groesbeck spent his youth alternating between the Algarve in southern Portugal and coastal Maine. Privately educated in Europe, he went on to attend Harvard University before assuming appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.