Jennifer Gustetic

Assistant Director - Open Innovation | White House

Ms. Gustetic’s experience has focused on the public sector with concentrations on program and change management, open innovation, prizes and challenges, technology policy, innovation process and management, public private partnerships, grants management, and open government. Currently, Ms. Gustetic is the Assistant Director for Open Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, she is responsible for scaling the use of open innovation approaches like prizes, crowdsourcing, and citizen science across the Federal Government. As described by Popular Mechanics in August 2014: “In 2012, [NASA] also hired Jenn Gustetic, a vivacious woman with an aerospace engineering degree and a master’s in technology policy from MIT, to engage the public as the first-ever Challenges and Prizes program executive. In this role, Gustetic uses her brains, charm, and wicked networking skills to increase grassroots participation in NASA’s far-ranging mission. In the process, she’s breaking down the wall that once separated a massive bureaucracy from the people it was supposed to serve.” Throughout her career Ms. Gustetic has managed programs at the intersection of innovation process, technology policy, and public-private partnerships. She is particularly skilled at navigating complex bureaucracies to define problems and leading teams to develop strategies to solve them while developing buy-in with key stakeholders. She pushes organizations to more innovative postures while recognizing and considering the key legal, cultural and political boundaries that exist. Ms. Gustetic speaks often at events and has also authored several papers on many topics including leveraging grand challenges to unleash science and technology breakthroughs, open innovation, security policy, harnessing public-private partnerships to optimize public service delivery, and the evolution of e-democracy. Ms. Gustetic holds a bachelors degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in technology policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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