Francesca Ioffreda

Francesca Ioffreda is Maryland’s first chief innovation officer, a new state role within Governor Wes Moore’s office. In this capacity, she leads a team focused on tackling Governor Moore’s top priorities, which include increasing economic mobility, reducing childhood poverty, fostering cross-sector partnerships, and delivering public services in innovative ways that improve lives for Marylanders. As CIO, she leads the first Bloomberg Philanthropies-supported innovation team at the state level in the United States. 

Throughout her career, Ioffreda has led collaborative efforts to foster economic growth, innovation, and workforce development. She is passionate about inclusive place-based strategies that bring together stakeholders from across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to create and expand economic opportunities.  

In 2023, Ioffreda founded Breakthrough Strategy Partners, a consulting firm that designs strategies for businesses, governments, and nonprofits to build vibrant and thriving communities. She has collaborated on economic mobility, collective action, and place-based economic development projects, including supporting regions on their strategies for the Economic Development Administration’s $10 billion Tech Hubs program, and working with business and civic alliances across the country to develop shared impact models to address talent and opportunity gaps. She is also a senior advisor to the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, where she is supporting the Center’s new economic development program. 

Previously, Ioffreda launched an inclusive growth initiative and spearheaded regional workforce efforts at the Greater Washington Partnership, a CEO-led civic alliance of over 45 of the region’s largest employers focused on making the Baltimore-to-Richmond, Va. region more economically competitive. She served as the Partnership’s vice president for inclusive growth and talent initiatives from 2020 to 2023.  

Notably, she led the Partnership’s $4.7 billion, five-year collective commitment to shared prosperity, unveiled alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and Small Business Administration Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman in March 2022. Ioffreda helped operationalize these commitments in supplier diversity, community banking, and racial equity through targeted programing, communities of practice, and tools and resources. Ioffreda also led the development of a Regional Blueprint for Inclusive Growth—an integrated, first-of-its-kind, private-sector-led 10-year economic development strategy that engaged over 200 cross-sector stakeholders, and an accompanying Inclusive Growth Dashboard to track progress.  

While at the Partnership, Ioffreda oversaw the Collaborative of Leaders in Academia and Business—an action-oriented partnership of businesses and academic institutions focused on driving solutions that prepare more learners for in-demand careers and providing transparency into labor market needs and talent trends via an employer signaling system. 

Earlier, as a consultant at Deloitte, Ioffreda served as chief of staff for the firm’s Smart Cities practice and an engagement manager. She led projects on regional growth strategies, jobs plans, supply chains, and innovation ecosystems, including efforts to reposition California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base as a commercial spaceport and grow the life sciences industry across the state of New York. She also started and led an innovative national diversity, equity, and inclusion recruiting effort for the firm.  

Ioffreda has served as a policy fellow for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and worked on a criminal justice reform project with former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Bloomberg Innovation Delivery team. As a Fulbright Fellow in Bogotá, Colombia, she researched the impact of the country’s conditional cash transfer program on poverty alleviation.  

Ioffreda was selected as a Washington Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree (2022) and was a graduate of Leadership Greater Washington (2022). She currently serves as a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Metro and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  

Ioffreda has a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she was a Zuckerman Fellow, a George Leadership Fellow, and a Forté Foundation Fellow. Ioffreda graduated cum laude with a degree in economics and international relations from Claremont McKenna College.