Ross O'Brien (age 46), Independent, non-executive Board Member, is an analyst, writer, presenter, and consultant focused on the economies and business environments of the Asia-Pacific, with over 25 years of experience in the region. His analysis surrounds Asia’s Innovation Economy—the intersection of information technology and the region’s broader society and economy. For nine years he was Director of the Economist Corporate Network, a membership-based business advisory programme for senior executives of multinationals in Asia.
Based in Hong Kong for over 17 years, Ross has an AB in Asian Studies and Anthropology from Dartmouth College (1989), and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School (1996). He is conversant and literate in Mandarin and Indonesian. Currently, and beginning in 2003, Ross was Managing Director of the Hong Kong operations of Intercedent Asia, a region-wide partnership of B2B market consultants, which provides research-based market entry and positioning advice in several verticals across Asia. Ross' practice focuses on market entry strategies for telecoms and IT companies, in managed services and wireless solutions. His client work involved extensive research work in over a dozen economies in Asia, including extended field research in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Ross was also for many years an analyst and Asian research director for Pyramid Research (once a subsidiary of the Economist Intelligence Unit, now a division of Progressive Digital Media) a telecoms advisory firm providing forecasts and analysis on infrastructure and services markets in emerging markets. Ross worked for Pyramid in the US, Singapore and Hong Kong. Ross has also served as a Research Director of Advisory Services for Strategic Intelligence, a venture-funded economic analysis firm with an emphasis on Internet-based delivery of analysis and forecasts on ‘new economy’ industries and markets in Asia. From 1996 to 1998, he was a consultant in AT&T Solutions' operational process improvement practice, serving financial services and telecoms clients in China and Indonesia, including a yearlong project overseeing customer care service process improvement for PT Telkom, based in Bandung.
