Martin Fisher

Martin Fisher co-founded KickStart International after working in Kenya for 6 years, including 5 years with ActionAid. KickStart designs affordable moneymaking tools and mass-markets them to poor entrepreneurs and farmers, who buy the equipment and use it to establish highly profitable family businesses. Fisher has won numerous awards and recognition for his inventions and work as a social entrepreneur, including the IDEA Design Gold Medal, TIME Magazine's 2003 European Hero award, 2005 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Schwab Foundation's "2003 Social Entrepreneur of the Year" award. In 2008 he was named Engineer of the Year by Design News magazine and received the prestigious $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability. Fisher earned his BS in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, followed by an MS and PhD in mechanical design and theoretical and applied mechanics from Stanford University.