Elena Bondareva is a distinguished thought leader and strategist with globally leading expertise in transformation and extensive experience in sustainable development, entre- and intrapreneurship, and social impact. With a career spanning six continents over two decades, Elena has made significant contributions to both industry and academia, particularly in the realm of what creating game-changing innovation.
Elena holds a notable position in the field of strategic foresight as consultant, Board director, author, and keynote speaker. She has catalyzed over two dozen ventures around the world and helped countless others go to the next level through her consulting practice, Vivit Group Worldwide. This includes national banks, listed companies, major universities, diplomatic consulates, international non-profits, industry associations, and government agencies; a track record that is a testament to her uncanny ability to track global trends, identify their implications for specific sectors, and mine emerging opportunities.
Elena has held public, private, teaching, and Board roles in Australia, India, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and the US. This global experience has honed her ability to draw on international precedent to render innovation native to any place in the world so that it can be optimally effective.
Specifically, she has helped several companies successfully enter the US marketplace by developing their expansion strategies, guiding capital raising, and even stepping in as an interim executive to build momentum before handing off to a team she helped built.
Elena has also developed an acute understanding of emerging markets. It was demonstrated as early as 2005, when she developed “Ontek in Russia: Growing in a Volatile Transition Environment;” a case study that delves into the challenges faced by a Russian enterprise during a critical period of economic transition following the implosion of the Soviet Union; a publication that became mandatory reading for an MBA course at Cornell University. In the years that followed, Elena helped adapt the Green Building Council model to South Africa and Russia, training industry and delivering keynotes from Johannesburg to Siberia and Bangalore. Elena’s fluency at contextual innovation is further exhibited by her role on the delegation of Australians who travelled to Moscow, Russia for the handover of COP in 2012.
Throughout her career, Elena has been on the frontlines of emerging industries. Early in her career, that was green building. She helped establish four Green Building Councils around the world, co-founded the Living Future Institute Australia, leveraged market mechanisms to accelerate the uptake of sustainable practices, and was invited to advise on the sustainability of the Sochi Olympics. Then, she served two terms on the Global Advisories of the WELL Building Institute, producing the WELL Health Safety and WELL Health Equity ratings. Her article, “COVID 19. That seat at the table – it’s ours, calls upon the built environment community to leverage its impact on health and wellbeing during global crises. This piece highlights how Elena can see and articulate an industry’s potential to address a contemporary societal pain point.
Further demonstrating her ability to chart new paths in ways that open doors for business, Elena has helped advance the role of blockchain technologies in the transition to a clean energy future. The broad response to her open letter to the blockchain community (2022) illustrates her influence. She has also helped popularize the notion of grid-interactive precincts, as captured in her engaging series for the Facilities Management Journal by IFMA that includes “Grid-interactive Buildings: Peer-to-Peer Trading ” and “Grid-interactive Buildings | RECs: What do Renewable Energy Certificates Mean to Real Estate,” “Electric Vehicles: Batteries on Wheels”, and a chapter in Extreme Green Buildings, “A Day In A Life of Alex, a Facility Manager at a Grid-Interactive Campus.
For the last decade, Elena has also focused on integrating environmental and social considerations into organizational strategies. Her leading expertise is evident in the breadth of her advisory roles and the fact that the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship – a global authority on the topic – asked Elena in 2023 to help revise the models for modelling, measuring, and reporting on impact. Through her role on the international Board of Pollinate Group, Elena has helped proved that business is a vehicle for radical solutions to poverty.
Elena’s through leadership is further demonstrated through her commitment to equip others in emerging skillsets. She has lectured at several universities, created a program that allowed Masters students from the Universities of Melbourne and Pretoria to create contextual regenerative innovation, contributed to IEA curriculum, continually shares actionable insight through a standing column with The Fifth Estate, her Substack, and social media, and published Change-maker’s Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Make Meaningful Impact Through Business (2023).
Furthermore, Elena’s current PhD through RMIT University aims to articulate the periodic table of transformation, taking our collective understanding of how to create change to the next level.
Overall, Elena Bondareva’s career is marked by her dedication to solving stubborn problems through fusing entrepreneurship and innovation with systems thinking. Her contributions to industry, global discourse, and the future generation of leaders reflect her unwavering commitment to making a positive impact on the world.
Character:
Elena Bondareva is a resilient, driven, and transformational leader known for her ability to navigate complex challenges with unwavering optimism and determination. Her character is defined by a commitment to excellence, integrity, and a deep sense of responsibility toward her team and organization.
Knowledge:
Elena possesses deep expertise in transformation in both strategy and operations, across various industries, and at the project, organization, industry, and topic level; expertise she is advancing through her current PhD research (RMIT University). Spanning technology commercialization to organizational change, Elena’s expertise makes her a versatile leader in any business environment.
Strategic:
Elena is a strategic leader who excels at mining global trends for actionable opportunities, crafting long-term visions that align with organizational goals, and executing them in ways that build replicable capability across teams. She is adept at identifying growth opportunities and leveraging resources to achieve sustainable success, driving meaningful change in the organizations she leads.
Communication:
Elena is a master communicator, capable of articulating complex ideas clearly and persuasively to diverse audiences. Her ability to engage and inspire stakeholders at all levels ensures alignment, mobilizes people to pursue possibility, and fosters a collaborative culture within her teams. Elena’s fluency in languages (native/bilingual proficiency in Russia; basic French and Spanish) and cultures complement her global perspective and enhance her capacity to engage, persuade, and lead diverse communities.
