Ghana’s Bright Simons, President of mPedigree Network, is one of the five Fellows from across the Aspen Global Leadership Network who will be joining the Braddock Scholars Program this year.

Other Fellows include Matthew Alexander, Founder and Board Member of One World Health; Cody Friesen, Founder and CEO . of Zero Mass Water; Jessica Sager, CEO of All Our Kin, Inc and  Derwin Sisnett, Founder and Partner, Maslow Development.

These Fellows have a big vision to make a transformational impact on society by bringing their venture to significant scale.

Commenting on his appointment, Mr. said, “As you know, the Aspen Institute, through the Braddock Scholarship, brings together innovators working on emerging concepts with potential for massive scale and established global leaders who can help innovators navigate the risks of such breakthrough innovation. I am very pleased about the Fellowship for precisely this reason.” 

He said over the last decade parts of our mPedigree solution have greatly matured, but their biggest impact is yet to come.

“That impact would be driven by cutting-edge work in machine learning and organo-sensors we are doing right now, and we need all the support we can get to navigate the complexity of global deployment,” he added. 

The Braddock Scholars Program is built on the belief that entrepreneurs are great at starting businesses, but the skills needed to effectively scale these innovations are very different. 

The program serves to bridge the “scaling gap” by channelling the expertise of mentors, all of whom are Aspen Institute Trustees, toward the specific challenge or opportunity the Scholars face.

The program is made possible thanks to the generous efforts of Rick Braddock, Aspen Institute Trustee.

He shared the inspiration behind the program's inception "In spending quite a few years in the entrepreneurial space after my corporate career, I came to realize that innovation requires two rather distinct steps: ideation and scaling. The latter step is the most important one for value creation but requires skills not usually encompassed in an entrepreneur’s background. 

“The Aspen Institute allows us to bring together two perspectives to address these opportunities: entrepreneurs whose initiatives are already well beyond the start-up phase and senior members of the Aspen family, usually trustees, bringing wisdom derived from their long, successful careers, to be mentors. We’ve found from the first three years of the program that this is a highly satisfying association for each."

On this year's scholars, he said, “We have learned a lot to make the program better as we go. Now, in the program's fourth year, I have personally interviewed all five we have selected as Scholars.

“I am confident that they are all well on their way to creating solutions that can really make a difference on the national and even international stage and that we can help them get there.”

The program features three key components: High-level mentorship, which includes monthly calls for board-level conversations and advice, annual program gatherings, which feature peer learning and exchange and grant capital, which is used to further their scale goals.