Richard Boly

Richard Boly is a career U.S. diplomat and currently the Director of the Office of eDiplomacy, an applied technology think tank for the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he launched the Global Entrepreneurship Program.

Representing the U.S. Department of State, he served in the U.S. Embassy, Rome, where he developed and ran a program to promote entrepreneurship in Italy. Richard Boly has also worked at U.S. Embassies in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Paraguay. While working as the Embassy’s economic and commercial attaché in Asuncion, he leveraged modest program funds to sponsor a seminar for local judges and prosecutors to demonstrate how Paraguayan copyright law could be applied to software piracy. In his monograph “Commercial Diplomacy and the National Interest” (Business Council for International Understanding, 2004, 77-79) Harry W. Kopp details Boly’s efforts to persuade Paraguayian judges and prosecutors to enforce Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Paraguay. Boly persuaded Paraguayan Supreme Court judges and other law enforcement officials to address bribery and corruption.

Richard Boly is the most junior diplomat to win the Cobb Award for commercial diplomacy.

Other professional accomplishments include an assignment as the first Presidential Management Fellow with the Inter-American Foundation. Boly was a consultant with the Inter-American Development Bank.