Game Changer Profile

Tanya Accone, Senior Adviser on Innovation at UNICEF Read insights

Tanya Accone’s career has focused on helping international public and private sector organizations understand how to amplify their impact through the convergence of people, technology and innovation. She is committed to applying innovation for social impact and as a public good, especially with and for young people.

Accone is Senior Adviser on Innovation in the Office of Innovation at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). She leads Innovation Nodes, a transdisciplinary innovation foresight capability that focuses on novel wisdom in new and unknown areas of potential innovation for children, and headed the organization’s Global Innovation Centre leading UNICEF’s work to support more than 100 countries to implement innovative solutions at scale that have changed the lives of more than 250 million children and their communities.  

Some of these experiences have been featured in Forbes, Wired, a variety of podcasts and in a number of books including ‘Eat, Sleep, Innovate’, ‘Design for Social Innovation,’ ‘Inclusive Innovation’, ‘Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation’, and ‘Aftershock: The World’s Foremost Futurists Reflect on 50 Years of Future Shock―and Look Ahead to the Next 50.’ Tanya also shares her experiences on stage at global events like SXSW, TedX, SLUSH, TalentConnect, VivaTech, and InfoShare.

Accone is a Fulbright Fellow with multiple graduate degrees including in strategic foresight. She is currently undertaking her PhD in innovation, sustainability and transdisciplinarity. She is the fourth generation of her Chinese family to be born in South Africa, where she spent her childhood during apartheid on the outskirts of the city of Tshwane.