OUR TEAM

Dr. Elena Iankova is the Founding Director of the Center for International Business Advancement (CIBA) at Binghamton University. CIBA provides experiential courses, workshops, specialized programs and networking events that aim at increasing the global competitiveness of New York’s Southern Tier region. As part of CIBA’s activities Elena developed the ExportNY Program which leverages industry, private, university and governmental resources and experts to assist Southern Tier companies in expanding to international markets. Most recently she designed the Soft Landing New York Program which connects the vast expertise of Binghamton University and Cornell University with foreign businesses looking to establish a presence in the United States. She is also the Lead on international soft landing programming at the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator.

Elena has over fifteen years of teaching experience at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, now part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and at Binghamton University in the areas of international business management, international competitive strategy, global entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, and political risk management in emerging markets. She is an established expert in the areas of post-communist transitions, emerging markets, and international business. In addition to her two books on the political economy of post-communist restructuring (Eastern European Capitalism in the Making, Cambridge University Press 2002; and Business, Government and EU Accession: Strategic Partnership and Conflict, Lexington Books 2009), she has conducted research and published on political risk management strategies of multinational corporations in the post-communist region, as well as on the impact of the multinational corporation on local community development. Elena holds an M.S. and PhD degrees in industrial relations from Cornell University, and an M.A. degree in sociology from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria.