Amelia Pane Schaffner
"If we ask critical questions and listen deeply to each other, we will find sustainable, equitable, long-lasting, creative, collaborative solutions to problems that need solving, creating meaningful change."
Expertise Areas
Strategy & Innovation Leadership: Amelia has experience in building and managing initiatives that foster innovative cultures both locally and globally. She has led a global Innovation Initiative at Accenture, focusing on bringing more innovation resources to clients and building an internal innovation culture.
Entrepreneurship & Ecosystems: As a co-founder of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Goizueta Business School, Amelia has successfully run over 15 entrepreneurship initiatives, building 12+ strategic partnerships in the southeast ecosystem, facilitating funding for 25+ startups, coaching 100+startups, and advising a $1M minority focused fund
Management Consulting: Amelia has delivered strategy consulting engagements, ranging from business positioning to go-to-market assessments to market analysis, primarily in CMT (communications, media, tech) industries. She has worked on multiple projects for new product launches, go-to-market strategies, revenue growth, and cost-cutting initiatives for clients across industries.
Education & Capability Development: Amelia is an accomplished educator, having taught various sessions around entrepreneurship & innovation topics, including “How might we?” ideation sessions, as well as university-wide courses. While in consulting, she has also designed, built, & implemented company-wide culture-change and capability development programs, focusing on strategy, innovation, and design thinking.
Relationship-building & stakeholder engagement: Amelia has excellent relationship-building skills that drive engagement across multiple audiences, matrixed ecosystems, both in public and private settings. Amelia is a global citizen who has lived and worked in three continents, with a deep understanding of different cultures and the ability to work with diverse stakeholders.
Amelia Pane Schaffner is a Partner at Lexicon Strategies, focusing her practice on strategy consulting, ecosystem building, innovation agendas, and culture change efforts, for clients across the globe.
Amelia is an experienced Strategic Innovation Leader and Thinker with a passion for building and managing initiatives that foster innovative and entrepreneurial cultures, both locally and globally. She has deep relationship-building skills that drive engagement across multiple audiences and matrixed ecosystems.
Amelia brings a wide array of experiences to Lexicon, to help clients continuously unearth new partnerships, ideas, and opportunities. with experience in corporate strategy and core management consulting, problem framing, culture and change management, customer discovery and demand validation, business model and go-to-market framing, product-market fit and positioning, innovation approaches and idea pipelining, startup acceleration and investment fit, future trends and insights outlining, global and local ecosystems, academia networks and centers, capability development and skill building, program design and management, and design thinking and idea hacking.
Before joining Lexicon, Amelia co-founded and secured multi-million-dollar funding for the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Goizueta Business School – Emory University, ranked 22 among the 4,000+ American universities,. During her time there, she fostered a novel climate of entrepreneurship and innovation, successfully ran 15+ entrepreneurship initiatives, built 14+ strategic partnerships in the southeast ecosystem and beyond, facilitated the funding of 25+ startups, coached 100+ startups, and advised a $1M minority-focused fund.
In the time before Emory, Amelia spent many years at Accenture, whose current clients include 91 of the Fortune Global 100 and more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500. At Accenture, she delivered strategy consulting engagements, ranging from business positioning to go-to-market assessments to market analysis, revenue growth, and cost cutting, primarily in the communications, media, and tech industries. Over the years, she participated in thought leadership as well as “futuring” efforts. She also designed and launched a first-of-a-kind global innovation initiative focused on bringing innovation strategies to clients and building an internal innovation culture, together with the company’s Chief Strategy Officer as well as external partners. She was designated an Accenture Tech Labs Evangelist and collaborated on the annual Tech Vision report.
Amelia is also an accomplished educator, with a summa- cum laude Master of Science in Business, Finance, and Economics from LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy. She has designed and taught various trainings around entrepreneurship & innovation topics, designed corporate curricula and capability development programs, created playbooks and best practices forums. Amelia has also moderator and panelist experience, including having led multiple stakeholder sessions, and collaborated with the World Economic Forum.
Amelia has served on several boards and advisories, including Startup Atlanta, the RAISE Forum, Innov8GA, CNBC Disruptor 50 Advisory Council, and Emory’s Advancing Healthcare Innovation in Africa. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Emory-Goizueta 2022 Excellence Award for Influence, the Accenture A3 “Addo Agnitio” award for connect/contribute/champion behavior, and a Deloitte-Bersin Learning leaders award for a Strategy Podcast she designed while at Accenture. She has served as a startup mentor in accelerators and incubators like Techstars, ATV, and Goodie Nation.
Amelia is a global citizen who has lived and worked on three continents. She divides her time between the southeast, the Midwest, and Italy (where she is from), with her husband Todd, and two boys. On a personal level, she is a lifelong learner with passions for philosophy, poetry, and photography.
INSIGHTS
