Iqbal Quadir

Quadir was born in Jessore, Bangladesh. He moved to the United States in 1976 and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He completed his Secondary School Certificate from Jhenidah Cadet College, Bangladesh.

Quadir received a Bachelor of Science with honors from Swarthmore College (1981), followed by a Master of Arts (1983), and a Master of Business Administration (1987), the final two from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

His brother, Kamal Quadir, is also a Bangladeshi-American entrepreneur and artist.

Quadir served as a consultant to the World Bank in Washington, D.C. (1983–1985), an associate at Coopers & Lybrand (1987–1989), an associate at Security Pacific Merchant Bank (1989–1991), and vice president of Atrium Capital Corporation (1991–1993).

In 1993, Quadir began efforts to broaden mobile telephone access in rural Bangladesh by integrating telecommunications deployment with microfinance and local enterprise partnerships. As part of this effort, he founded a New York-based company called Gonofone. (Bengali for "phones for the masses"). Then, he organized a global consortium including Norway's Telenor telecommunications; an affiliate of micro-credit pioneer Grameen Bank in Bangladesh; Marubeni Corp. in Japan; Asian Development Bank in the Philippines; Commonwealth Development Corporation in the United Kingdom; and International Finance Corporation and Gonofone in the United States. The initiative aimed to provide telecommunications access through a model in which village entrepreneurs, supported by micro-loans, offered phone services in their local areas. Economist Jeffrey Sachs praised the Grameenphone initiative for demonstrating the potential of telecom expansion in low-income regions.

From 2001 to 2005, Quadir served as a Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School and taught graduate-level courses on technology in developing countries. At the same time, he was also a Fellow at the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (now Capgemini).

In 2005, Quadir went to MIT. In 2007, he started the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, which offers resources and programming to MIT students focused on entrepreneurship in developing countries. Quadir is no longer associated with the Legatum Center.

Quadir coined the phrase 'invisible leg' to describe how technological innovations change economies in terms of the distribution of economic and political influence.

To apply his development approach to electricity production in Bangladesh—where 70% of the population does not have access to the national electricity grid—Quadir founded Emergence BioEnergy, Inc., in 2006. This project and another one (namely, removing arsenic from water) were featured in an article titled "Power to the people" in the 9 March 2006 issue of The Economist. In 2007, Emergence BioEnergy won a Wall Street Journal Asian Innovation Award. After a decade of working on developing these projects, he became dissatisfied and shut them down.