We are excited to announce that Katharina Borchert will be transitioning from our Board of Directors to join the Mozilla leadership team as our new Chief Innovation Officer starting in January.

Mozilla was founded and has thrived based upon the principles of open innovation. We bring together thousands of people from around the world to build great products and empower others with technology, know-how and opportunity to advance the open Web. As Mozilla’s new Chief Innovation Officer, Katharina will be broadly responsible for fostering and further enriching Mozilla’s culture of open innovation and driving our process for identifying new opportunities, prioritizing them, and funding focused explorations across the whole of Mozilla’s global community.

Katharina has a background that includes more than a decade of new business growth and technological innovation in media and journalism, most recently as CEO at Spiegel Online, the online division of one of Europe’s most influential magazines. Prior to that, Katharina was Editor-in-Chief and CEO at WAZ Media Group, where she completely reimagined the way local and regional journalism could be done, launching a new portal “Der Westen” based heavily upon user participation, integrated social media, and one of the earliest with a focus on location-based data in journalism.

Most recently at Mozilla she has served on our Board of Directors since early 2014, and we have come to rely upon her keen strategic insights, broad knowledge of the Internet landscape and her significant executive leadership experience. She has become a strategic ally — a true Mozillian, who cares deeply about the issues of privacy, online safety and transparency that are all critical to the future of a healthy Internet and core to our mission.

Our success comes from fostering a true culture of open innovation in the world and our focus on product and technological innovation remains central to the fulfillment of our mission.

The entire Mozilla community welcomes you, Katharina.

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