Speaker

Alex Adamopoulos
Chief Executive Officer, Emergn Limited

Alex is a hands-on executive with more than 25 years experience and a successful track record in global professional services and technology organizations. Alex founded Emergn Limited in 2009. His work has spanned early stage and startup organizations and also Fortune 1000 companies.  Alex has extensive international experience with a deep understanding of culture, work, and life ethics especially in relation to establishing alignment and crossing cultural barriers.

Alex has served in several key leadership roles in his career with well known organizations always with a distinct focus on leadership  development, change management and international growth and expansion. Emergn‘s education led transformation approach is a culmination of a career centered on learning as a change agent.

Chair

Kumaar Bagrodia
Founder & CEO, NeuroLeap

Founder of NeuroLeap, India’s leading applied neuroscience company.

Kumaar has several years of cross functional expertise across industries and domains. He has earlier worked with companies like Infosys and WNS where he was an associate director globally. He has consistently been rated very highly by customers across the globe which include leading global investment banks, consulting firms, financial research houses and Fortune 100 corporates.

Kumaar holds an MBA degree from the University of Oxford, is a Country Champion and Ambassador for the Oxford Business Alumni in India. He is a member of the national startup council of CII and is a member of Apex Council of the India Innovation Initiative by the Government of India.
He has been featured in various media in India and abroad including Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Journal, The Economic Times, Hindustan Times, Bloomberg TV, Fortune and Forbes to name a few. He co-authored an article in Harvard HBR.

He is a speaker at leading podiums including the Bombay Stock Exchange (India’s main stock exchange), has chaired international leader sessions in Israel, China, Singapore and has spoken at fora with the support of Australian Government, United Nations Environment Program, the Government of India to name a few. He was a speaker at G20  Summit yea in China 2016 and in the G20 Summit yea in Germany 2017. Kumaar was invited by the Hon’ble President of India to the official residence of the President. He was again invited in March 2018 to speak on Innovation, education and skills.

He was a speaker at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London in 2018. He was recently a keynote speaker at the World Neuron Congress in Finland and at the World Brain Congress in UAE.

Speaker

Amit Bajaj
CEO Europe, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)

Amit Bajaj is Head of Tata Consultancy Service’s European business, a unit which spans over 15 countries generating Euro 2 bn in revenues and supported by over 40,000 employees. He oversees strategic, customer, organizational and operational functions organized around 7 sub-regions that make up this unit – Nordics (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark), Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands & Luxembourg), Central (Germany & Austria), Switzerland, France, South (Italy, Spain & Portugal) and Eastern (Hungary & Poland). In the 20 years that Amit has worked for TCS, he has occupied several leadership roles across markets & industries.

Prior to his appointment in 2016 as head of European business, Amit was the head of TCS’s North European business where he oversaw emergence of TCS as the industry leading provider with top ranking growth & customer satisfaction, helping customer drive twin objectives of simplification and digital transformation.

Earlier in his career, Amit managed TCS’ Consumer & Retail industry vertical for Europe based in the Netherlands and spearheaded the founding of European outsourcing practice at TCS. Before moving to Europe in 2005, Amit spent over 5 years in the US in various industry and service line roles where he drove TCS’ positioning into an integrated service provider, winning TCS’ first integrated IT - Business Process outsourcing contract.

An engineer & MBA by qualification, Amit is a dean’s scholar from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India. His professional interests are in the areas of organization behavior & operating model design. Amit represents TCS in BusinessEurope forum, a leading advocate for growth and competitiveness at European level.

In his spare time, Amit is passionate about nature, long-distance running and behavioral economics. He lives in Stockholm, with his wife Ritu and daughter Riam.

Speaker

Aaron Barcant
Independent Research
Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy

Aaron Barcant is an independent scholar affiliated with the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy. He is also Projects Manager for SF Marina Caribbean. Research interests include histories of economics, science, and transportation-communication. These knowledges are combined with the practice of management in the field of marine development in the Caribbean.

Speaker

Julian Birkinshaw
Deputy Dean, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

Julian Birkinshaw is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Deputy Dean at the London Business School. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Academy of Social Scientists (FAcSS) and the Academy of International Business.

Julian is a recognised expert on innovation, entrepreneurship and renewal in large corporations. He has written fourteen books, including Fast/Forward, Becoming a Better Boss, Reinventing Management, and Giant Steps in Management, and over ninety articles in such journals as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Academy of Management Journal.

He is regularly quoted in international media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, Bloomberg Business Week and The Times, and he speaks regularly at business conferences in the UK, Europe, North America and Australia. In 2015, he was ranked 43rd on the Thinkers 50 list of the most influential management thinkers in the world.

Julian has PhD and MBA degrees in Business from the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Durham. He has been on the faculty at London Business School for eighteen years, and is currently Deputy Dean (Programmes) and Director of the Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Stockholm School of Economics, 2009.

Julian is co-founder with bestselling author Gary Hamel of the Management Innovation Lab (MLab), a unique partnership between academia and business that seeks to accelerate the evolution of management. He is very active as a consultant, speaker, and executive educator to many large corporations, including Arup, Bayer, BMW, Deloitte, IBM, Novo Nordisk, Petrofac, Rio Tinto, Roche, Tata, Toshiba, UBS, and Unilever.

Speaker

Martin Böhm
Dean and Professor of Marketing at IE Business School

Martin Böhm is the Dean and Professor of Marketing at IE Business School in Madrid. He previously served as the Dean of Programs, the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at IE University and the Associate Dean of the Master in Management at IE Business School.

Martin’s intellectual interests center on Customer Management. His research provides managerial implications on how to build profitable and long-lasting customer relationships. His primary concern is to quantify the impact of various customer management activities on a customer’s lifetime value – the net present value of the stream of future profits expected over a customer’s lifetime. At the same time, he develops analytical models to estimate or approximate a customer’s lifetime value. As a consultant he works primarily with firms in the financial services industry to provide them with a roadmap for growth.

Martin is teaching across IE’s Master in Management, MBA, Executive MBA, and PhD programs. Prior to joining the IE Business School faculty, he studied International Business at Reutlingen University of Applied Sciences and received a Master of Business Administration from the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship. He completed his academic education with a Doctorate in Marketing which he obtained from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt.

Speaker

Richard Brem
Senior Advisor, Peter Drucker Society Europe

Richard Brem is a freelance journalist, working mainly for Austria's public radio station Ö1. He met Peter Drucker in 1999 on the occasion of Drucker's 90th birthday amd conducted a lengthy video interview with him, which is currently being re-edited and will be released under the title "Drucker Unplugged" on the Peter Drucker Society website later this year.

Speaker

Micael Buckle
CEO Interface

Micael Buckle consults all around the world in the areas of: strategy, leadership, organizational and leadership team development.

Micael is recognized globally for his great knowledge and experience in the use of the LEGO Serious Play methodology.

Micael has done more than 800 workshops globally based on the LEGO Serious Play methodology.

Micael also train and certify other trainers in the LEGO Serious Play methodology.

Micael is furthermore an Adjunct Professor (part time) at Hult & Ashridge International Business School.

Chair

Curtis R. Carlson
Professor of Practice at Northeastern University; Distinguished Executive in Residence at Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Founder & CEO, The Practice of Innovation; Former CEO of SRI International

Curtis R. Carlson was SRI International’s President and CEO from 1998 to 2014. Carlson’s company, Practice of Innovation, LLC, works with companies, governments, and universities to improve innovative performance.

While CEO, SRI grew 3.5 times and became a global model for the creation of high-value innovations, such as HDTV, Intuitive Surgical, Siri on the iPhone, and many other world-changing advances that created tens of billions of dollars of new economic value. Mayfield Ventures partner, David Ladd, said, “SRI is now the best enterprise at turning its technology into economic value.”

He started and helped lead the high-definition television (HDTV) program that became the U.S. standard and won an Emmy Award for the team. Another team started by Carlson won an Emmy for optimized satellite broadcast image quality.

He served on President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation and the U.S. NSF Engineering Advisory Board.

Carlson is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. In 2017, he became a Worcester Polytechnic Institute “Luminary”, one of only 11 in the 150-year history of the university. He has received four honorary degrees and given numerous commencement addresses.

With William Wilmot, Carlson wrote "Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want," published by Random House. It was selected by BusinessWeek as a Top-10 business book that year.

In 2018 he developed for NSF the “Innovation for Impact (I4I), Value Creation Guidebook” to improve the performance of NSF’s major R&D initiatives. The practices we teach were documented in a U.S. National Academy report on Center-Based R&D (https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24767/a-new-vision-forcenter-based-engineering-research).

With Northeastern University, Carlson has created an on-line version of his value-creation methodology so that it can be used globally. At WPI he is teaching value creation to the project teams. The goal is that all students graduate with a certificate in value creation. It will be the world’s first project-based university to provides these essential, lifelong skills.

Carlson received his B.S. degree in physics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Skull. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees were from Rutgers University. Carlson has published or presented numerous technical publications and holds fundamental patents in the fields of image quality, image coding, and computer vision.

Speaker

Ed Catmull
Co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios.

Dr. Ed Catmull is co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios. For over twenty-five years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing fourteen consecutive #1 box office hits, which have grossed more than  $8.7 billion at the worldwide box office to date, and won thirty Academy Awards®.

His book Creativity, Inc.—co-written with journalist Amy Wallace and years in the making—is a distillation of the ideas and management principles Ed has used to develop a creative culture. A book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, it also grants readers an all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation Studios—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history have been made.

Dr. Catmull has been honored with five Academy Awards®, including an Oscar of Lifetime Achievement for his technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion picture industry. Dr. Catmull earned B.S. degrees in computer science and physics and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah.  In 2005, the University of Utah presented him with an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Engineering.

Speaker

Vinton G. Cerf
VP and chief Internet evangelist, Google

Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

Cerf is the former senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. In this role, Cerf was responsible for helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M. Turing award in 2004 for their work on the Internet protocols. The Turing award is sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science.” In November 2005, President George Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work. The medal is the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize.

Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet. During his tenure from 1976-1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data and security technologies.

Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007. Cerf also served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992-1995 and in 1999 served a term as Chairman of the Board. In addition, Cerf is honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new Internet protocol. Cerf served as a member of the U.S. Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2001 and serves on several national, state and industry committees focused on cyber-security. Cerf sits on the Board of Directors for the Endowment for Excellence in Education, the Americas Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), CosmosID, StopBadWare, the Gorilla Foundation and the Intaba Institute (for the Deaf). Cerf also sits on the Board of Associates of Gallaudet University. He serves on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advisory Committee and serves as Chair of the Visitors Committee on Advanced Technology of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. He also serves as 1st Vice President and Treasurer of the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation. Cerf is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the Annenberg Center for Communications at USC, the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, the Hasso Platner Institute and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. In 2011, he was made Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet. These include the Marconi Fellowship, Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the Prince of Asturias award for science and technology, the National Medal of Science from Tunisia, the St. Cyril and St. Methodius Order (Grand Cross) of Bulgaria, the Alexander Graham Bell Award presented by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, the NEC Computer and Communications Prize, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, the ACM Software and Systems Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Computer and Communications Industries Association Industry Legend Award, installation in the Inventors Hall of Fame, the Yuri Rubinsky Web Award, the Kilby Award , the Rotary Club International Paul P. Harris Medal, the Joseph Priestley Award from Dickinson College, the Yankee Group/Interop/Network World Lifetime Achievement Award, the George R. Stibitz Award, the Werner Wolter Award, the Andrew Saks Engineering Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Leadership Award, the J.D. Edwards Leadership Award for Collaboration, World Institute on Disability Annual Award and the Library of Congress Bicentennial Living Legend medal. Cerf was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006. He was made an Eminent Member of the IEEE Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) honor society in 2009. In 2010 he received a Lifetime Webby Award. In February 2011 he was named a Stanford Engineering School “Hero” for his work on the Internet and received a lifetime achievement award from the Oxford Internet Institute. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year's "25 Most Intriguing People."  

In addition to his work on behalf of Google and the Internet, Cerf has served as a technical advisor to production for "Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict" and made a special guest appearance on the program in May 1998. Cerf has appeared on television programs NextWave with Leonard Nimoy and often co-hosted World Business Review with Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger. Cerf also holds an appointment as distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he is working on the design of an interplanetary Internet. Cerf holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Stanford University and Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA. He also holds honorary Doctorate degrees from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich; Lulea University of Technology, Sweden; University of the Balearic Islands, Palma; Capitol College, Maryland; Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania; George Mason University, Virginia; Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York; the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands; Brooklyn Polytechnic; Marymount University; the University of Pisa; the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications; Tschingua University, Beijing, China; the University of Zaragoza, Spain; the Technical University of Cartagena, Spain; the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain; Bethany College, Kansas; the Moscow State University of International Relations and the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology.

His personal interests include fine wine, gourmet cooking and science fiction. Cerf and his wife, Sigrid, were married in 1966 and have two sons, David and Bennett.

Speaker

Adam Cheyer
Co-Founder & VP Engineering, Viv Labs; Co-Founder, Siri Inc.

Currently, Adam Cheyer is co-Founder and VP Engineering of Viv Labs, a startup simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything. Previously, Adam Cheyer was co-Founder and VP Engineering at Siri, Inc., a company aimed at fundamentally redesigning the face of the consumer mobile experience. In 2010, Siri was acquired by Apple, where Mr. Cheyer became a Director of Engineering in the iPhone/iOS group. Mr. Cheyer is is also a Founding Member and Advisor to Change.org, the premier social network for positive social change, and a co-Founder of Sentient Technologies.

Before starting Siri, Adam Cheyer was a Program Director in SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, where he served as Chief Architect of the CALO/PAL project, an ambitious effort to create a next-generation personal cognitive assistant that learns and self-improves "in the wild" (e.g. with no code changes). Cheyer's team was responsible for integrating state-of-the-art AI technologies from 25 research institutions, universities, and commercial companies, into a functioning system that can provide user value and pass a set of yearly SAT-like tests.

Mr. Cheyer was VP of Engineering at Dejima (acquired by Sybase), where he was responsible for managing Dejima's engineering staff, technology strategy, and for guiding the company's product development in the areas of accelerated mobile search for enterprise and consumer applications.

As VP of Engineering at Verticalnet (NASDAQ: VERT, acquired by BravoSolution), Mr. Cheyer was responsible for development organizations delivering products for consortium marketplaces, private markets, and extended enterprise solutions.  Verticalnet's products included a set of integrated trading applications (auction, reverse auction, RFQ, structured negotiation), C2 Suite (an ontology-driven distributed data comprehension toolset), and OSM (a platform for managing intelligent integration throughout the connected enterprise). 

Mr. Cheyer has more than 15 years experience in a variety of roles, including executive, software engineer, research scientist, consultant, lecturer, and technical manager. A pioneer in the areas of distributed computing, intelligent agents, and advanced user interfaces, he is the author of fifty-nine peer-reviewed publications and more than twenty issued patents. Mr. Cheyer has also participated on a number of Program Committees and Advisory Boards.

As Senior Scientist and Co-Director of the Computer Human Interaction Center (CHIC) at SRI International, Mr. Cheyer led a multidisciplinary team of researchers exploring web services, distributed knowledge, and pervasive computing. While at Bull S.A., he was lead developer and architect for NOEMIE, a configuration expert system used to manage Bull's line of 30,000 hardware and software products worldwide.  Mr. Cheyer received his bachelor's degree with highest honors from Brandeis University and his master's degree with an "outstanding master's student" award from UCLA.

Speaker

Laurent Choain
Chief People, Education & Culture Officer, Mazars

Laurent currently serves as Chief People, Education & Culture Officer of Mazars, an international, European-originating, integrated and independent organisation in professional services. Mazars can rely on the talent of 40,000 professionals, led by 1000+ partners in 90+ countries over 6 continents.  
Laurent has led a career at the crossroads of leadership in large companies (banking sector, luxury hospitality), consulting, entrepreneurship as well as business schools.  For more than thirty years, his vocation has been to develop executive education through innovative endeavours in both academic and corporate worlds, founding and leading corporate universities, launching post-graduate programmes for executives and chairing think tanks on the future of leadership education. In June 2011, he joined the board of EFMD as well as the EQUIS Awarding Body in 2014, and became in 2013 a member of the board of the Peter Drucker Society Europe. Laurent also sat on the French Regulation Authority of Business Schools (CEFDG) between 2011 and 2017. He is a professor of leadership at the University of Paris Pantheon Assas, and fellow of ESCP Europe.

Speaker

Simone Cicero
Ideator and Partner, Platform Design Toolkit

l'm a self-starter, curious learner, and collaborator with a Iarge international relationships network and an engineering background. On top of the most technical of the backgrounds (engineering), l've worked long years in consulting and pre-sales facing the challenges of driving Innovation in bureaucratic corporate contexts and semi-public incumbents, coordinating high complexity software and hardware design projects and managed traditional sales pipelines.

Over time, l've left my curiosity to drive my life, through writing first- creating a blog, interviewing great people, developlng international relationships, conversations and projects- and Ieventually became a freelance designer, facilitator, conference host, and entrepreneur, with a strong focus on open business models, both in software and hardware.

I have an extensive experience of workingin edge contexts such as emergent, self-managed organizations that I contributed to design and bootstrap, and social movements to which I provided advisory and consulting. ln 2013 as a result of my experience with participative business models and organizations, I created the first fully open-source methodology for Platform and Ecosystems thinking- the Platform Design Toolkit- an approach that effectively contributed to kickstart a new design domaln, and reached rnore than 30 thousands practitioners all over the world. l've been workingwith all types of organizations  from Fortune SOOs to the UN,from Social Enterprises to Startups-on the topic of platform design and ecosystem weaving, reinventing business models and organizational structures to allow for a new theory of organizations to emerge in the XXIst century.
 

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Speaker

Claudia Crummenerl
Managing Director People & Organization globally and Head of People and Organization CE, Capgemini Invent

Claudia is an expert in the people perspective of digital, automation and AI. She collaborates and support clients in how leadership in the digital age is evolving, how workforce and organizations transform through automation and AI, how the HR function is composed and how to engage with employees during the process. Her particular project expertise lies in the rollout of large transformation programs in an international context.

Claudia combines Industry and Consulting expertise. She started and spend half of her career in the automotive industry in various positions in Germany, US and Japan driving change and HR projects. Since joining Capgemini Invent for their reputation in organizational transformation and change management, Claudia has been part of the German consulting team and now is Managing Director for the global People and Organization capability.

With Capgemini Invent’s strategic focus on Digital Transformation, Claudia has focused her thought leadership on how digital is transforming leadership, workforce and organizations. She regularly authors studies with the reputed Capgemini Research Institute and speaks at conference and client events.

Speaker

Kim Dabbs
Global Director Social Innovation, Steelcase

Kim Dabbs is a social entrepreneur, advocate and innovator who is leading Corporate Social Innovation for Steelcase. She has a passion for building a culture of opportunity and is leveraging that mindset as she partners with organizations leading transformational change projects around the world. She has scaled innovation and designed programs that showcased impact as she collaborated on the launch of the new Learning + Innovation Center that was built as a global hub in Munich.

Prior to joining Steelcase she served as executive director of the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology. Kim crafted a model for both adult career training and teen arts + tech engagement, leading to WMCAT’s inclusion in national learning networks as a best practice. Kim also led Michigan Youth Arts, where she built a coalition of 16 statewide organizations focused on public policy, philanthropy and advocacy for education.

Kim holds a Master of Public Administration from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Science in Art History from Kendall College of Art and Design. In 2015, she was chosen as one of four professionals globally to participate in a 3-month residency at Stanford’s d.school with leadership training in human centered design. She presents internationally on social innovation and design thinking at venues such as the Guggenheim, the Aspen Institute and TEDx.

Speaker

Jos de Blok
Founder & CEO Buurtzorg Nederland

Jos de Blok is the founder and CEO of Buurtzorg (neighborhood nursing), a Dutch organization with more than 10.000 employees, offering community based (home) care services to more than 80.000 patients a year. Founded in 2006 with one team of four nurses,  Buurtzorg has transformed home-based health care and it has created an innovative method for nursing care at home. As a community based and client centered organization, Buurtzorg connects highly qualified licensed nurses and clients to create positive and proactive solutions that are effective, holistic, and sustainable. Organized in small autonomous teams of up to 12 nurses within a neighborhood-sized care area, Buurtzorg nurses bring groundbreaking synergy and expertise in a direct and connected relationship between care-giver and client. Buurtzorg has succeeded in reducing administrative burden for nurses, improving quality of care and raising work satisfaction for their employees (Buurtzorg  was awarded three times employer of the year in the Netherlands). Buurtzorg is supported by an innovative IT system and works without management structure. Internationalization started by launching in Sweden, US, Belgium, Japan, China, South Korea, Scotland and UK.

Jos de Blok is a nurse by education and considered a change agent in the Netherlands when it comes to the organization of community based (home) care. Before he established Buurtzorg he had several senior management positions in home care organizations including director Innovations for medical services.

Chair

Philippe Dewost
Senior advisor, Internet, Tech & Digital Transformation.
Co-founded Wanadoo

Since the start of Wanadoo (Europe’s #1 Internet Service Provider), Philippe Dewost has been successfully launching consumer services, software startups, technology ecosystems, and corporate transformation programs. His innovation driven expertise spans across the private and public sectors, where Philippe is recognized as an senior advisor as well as an inspiring speaker.

Philippe has a deep experience in deploying for the many, through both scaling and empowering. He built and ran product management for Wanadoo across its first 4 years and first million subscribers. As CEO of imsense in Cambridge, he turned proprietary, patent protected dynamic range processing into eye-fidelity™ technology, now used half a billion times a day to enhance pictures taken with iPhones after Apple acquired the company.

While deploying Leonard, VINCI Group’s Corporate Innovation and Transformation Program, he combined a series of exploration groups ranging across 7 key future topics (Autonomous Vehicle, Climatic Resilience, AI, …) with an Intrapreneurship Program currently considered as a reference by other large Corporates.

He had previously led a €4,25 Bn digital package for the French Government - the Investments for The Future Program, where he wrote the report for the Prime Minister on how to make France a more attractive destination for innovators, Tech Entrepreneurs, and foreign Venture Capital Firms : his report sparked "La French Tech". He then initiated a joint Blockchain R&D effort with 27 institutions and partners.

A graduate in Physics at Normale Sup (Ulm), former Navigation Officer in the French Navy, Philippe holds a Master in Telecommunications from Telecom ParisTech and a MBA from Collège des Ingénieurs.

Speaker

Yves Doz
Solvay Chaired Professor of Technological Innovation and Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management, INSEAD

Through his research, teaching and consulting over many years, Yves Doz has helped executives and their companies develop and implement effective strategies that transcend inherent tensions and contradictions: Global vs. local in multinational innovations, value capture vs. value creation in alliances and continuity vs. agility when facing external disruptions. Among other corporates, he has helped Airbus (and its precursors Aerospatiale, DASA and British Aerospace), Avery Dennison, GSK, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, P&G, Teva, Timken, Toyota and Xerox navigate through these tensions. His work with the public sector recently included advising Finnish Parliament institute, SITRA, on developing strategically agile national governments and he teaches in a leadership development program for senior civil servants in Finland.

His academic peers elected him a Fellow of all three major Academic Societies in management, one of only four scholars worldwide to be bestowed such recognition. Yves has taught at Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business in the US and at leading business schools in Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Japan, and Korea. His research and publications have won numerous awards, including the first CK Prahalad Scholar- Practitioner Award from the Strategic Management Society. His most recent book “Ringtone: The rise and Fall of Nokia in mobile phones” is expected in November 2017.

Speaker

Amy Edmondson
Professor of Leadership & Management, HBS

Amy C. Edmondson, PhD is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been ranked by the biannual Thinkers50 global list of top management thinkers since 2011 (most recently #13). She teaches and writes on leadership, teams and organizational learning.  Her most recent book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for leaders who are serious about building a thriving organization in the today’s uncertain environment. Her prior books, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2012, 2103) and Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016) explore teamwork in dynamic, unpredictable work environments.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on the design and implementation of transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller's mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design, all from Harvard University.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, George Daley, a physician-scientist and Dean of Harvard Medical School, with their two college-age sons.

Speaker

Martin Ferguson
Director of Policy & Research, Socitm

Martin Ferguson is Policy & Research Director for Socitm, UK’s professional network for leaders engaged in innovation, technology and modernisation of public services. He leads and represents Socitm on the following policy and research themes:

• Ethical and secure use of emerging technologies and data
• Healthy and well communities
• Leadership, diversity and skills
• Modernising ICT service delivery
• Service design and transformation.
 
A graduate of the Universities of Wales, Waterloo (Canada) and Birmingham, his local government career spans planning, environment, housing, leisure and recreation, IT and policy support services. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a member of Major Cities of Europe’s Organizing Committee, programme manager for the UK Local CIO Council and a past President of Socitm.

In Brazil and central Asia, he has led work on the British Council’s e-governance programmes. He has served as an associate lecturer for the University of Birmingham’s Public Service MBA in the UK and Hong Kong, a senior lecturer for the Open University Business School and an external examiner for Henley Business School. Currently, he sits on industry advisory boards for the Universities of Hertfordshire, Kingston and Loughborough and is a Trustee for Rennie Grove Hospice Care.

An adventurer, he has travelled to every continent, combining his interest in the world and its diverse environments, peoples and cultures with mountain trekking and cross-country skiing. Married with four children, he lives in St Albans, Hertfordshire (UK).

Speaker

Bill Fischer
Professor of Innovation Management, IMD

Bill Fischer is a Professor of Innovation Management at IMD. He co-founded and co-directs the IMD program on Driving Strategic Innovation, in cooperation with the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

An engineer by training, American by citizenship, Bill has lived much of his life in Asia and Europe. He held a full-professorship and endowed chair on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1976-1998), first moved to China in 1980, and later became the President of the China Europe International Business School [CEIBS], in Shanghai (1997-1999). He has been awarded the Silver Magnolia award, Shanghai’s highest award for foreigners contributing to the city’s development, in 1999.

He first joined IMD in 1990, and was part of the IMD team that developed the Managerial Deep Dive process for improved innovation conversations. His most recent book: “Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier has Changed the Way that Big Companies Transform” [with Umberto Lago & Fang Liu].

In 2013, he was included among “The Top 50 Business School Professors on Twitter,” and Innovation Excellence’s “Top 50 Innovation Twitter Sharers of 2013”. Also, in 2013, “Reinventing Giants”, has been short-listed for Thinkers50 “book of the year” award.

Speaker

Karolin Frankenberger
Academic Director, Executive MBA HSG, Executive School of Management, Technology and Law; University of St.Gallen
Director of the Institute of Management and Strategy, School of Management; University of St.Gallen

Prof. Dr. Karolin Frankenberger is the Academic Director of the Executive MBA in the Executive School of Management, Technology and Law at the University of St.Gallen as well as Chair Owner and Director of the Institute of Management & Strategy (IoMS-HSG) of the University of St. Gallen. Previously, Prof. Dr. Frankenberger was assistant professor at the University of Lucerne and the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St.Gallen and spent almost 7 years with the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. In 2004, she received a PhD from the Institute of Management, University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, and was a visiting researcher at Harvard Business School and the School of Business at the University of Connecticut.

Her research is primarily focused on Business Model Innovation and Business Transformation, Ecosystems and Sustainability. Her book, “The Business Model Navigator: 55 Models that will Revolutionise your Business” has been published by FT Pearson and has been translated into several languages and is considered a standard reference in business model innovation literature.

Speaker

Michael J. Gelb
Creative thinking pioneer and executive coach

Michael J. Gelb is the world’s leading authority on the application of genius thinking to personal and organizational development. A pioneer in creative thinking, accelerated learning, and innovative leadership, he leads seminars for DuPont, Merck, Microsoft, Nike, Roche, and YPO, bringing over 35 years of experience as professional speaker, seminar leader, and organizational consultant to his diverse, international clientele.

One of 14 books on creativity and innovation, his international best seller “How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day“ has been translated into 25 languages and has appeared on the Washington Post, Amazon, and the New York Times best seller lists.

Winner of a 1999 Brain Trust Charity’s “Brain of the Year” award and a 2003 Batten Fellowship from University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business, Michael was director of creativity and innovation leadership for the Conscious Capitalism Institute, and codirects the Leading Innovation Seminar at Darden with Professor James Clawson. A former professional juggler, certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, and fifth-degree black belt in aikido, he has created many best-selling audio programs and coauthored books with chess grandmaster Raymond Keene and Sarah Miller Caldicott, great grandniece of Thomas Edison.

Speaker

Rick Goings
Chairman Emeritus Tupperware Brands Corporation

Rick Goings is Chairman Emeritus of Tupperware Brands.  Throughout his successful career, he has held a number of global senior management positions in Europe, Asia and the U.S.  During his tenure and under his leadership at Tupperware Brands, the company received numerous awards and recognition including Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies for eight consecutive years, America’s Most JUST Companies from Forbes, Barron’s 2018 100 Most Sustainable Companies, Forbes 2018 list of America’s Best Mid-Size Employers and a 2017 Corporate Champion for leadership in driving gender parity on corporate boards by the Women’s Forum of New York.

An engaged member of the World Economic Forum, Goings is at the forefront of thought leadership on Gender Equality, Education and the Future of Work initiatives in Davos.  He was selected to be an inaugural HeForShe IMPACT Champion with United Nations Women (UNW) and a founding member of the UNW Private Sector Leadership Advisory Council appointed by Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. He serves on the national board of the Smithsonian Institution, the Global Peter Drucker Forum and Rollins College.  He is a former member of the board of governors for Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA), having served as National Chairman for two terms.  Using his experience and insight as a global corporate and social impact leader, he has driven the expansion of youth clubs into international markets, first into Mexico, where there are now 9 Clubs with 9 more on the horizon, and then into South Africa with 6 successful Clubs in Johannesburg and Soweto.

With his extensive knowledge of a broad spectrum of subjects – from current global business trends, inspirational leadership, strategy and competitive advantage to mentorship and sponsorship, mindfulness and meditation, philanthropy and social impact – Goings is highly respected and sought after for public speaking engagements in the corporate, non-profit and academic arenas, as well as by global media.

Goings has received numerous international awards, including the distinguished decree of "Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur" (Knight of the Legion of Honor) by the former President of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, in recognition of his long term dedication to the role of women in developing countries and children’s causes.  Having lived and worked in Asia for a number of years, the People’s Republic of China bestowed him with the prestigious Marco Polo Award for his visionary leadership and significant role in China’s economic development. Boys & Girls Clubs of America honored him with their highest award, the Herbert Hoover Humanitarian Award for his outstanding leadership and the Holmes Group named Goings as CEO of the Year. The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument honored Goings and his wife, Susan Porcaro Goings, with the Voice for Women Award for their exemplary commitment to the economic empowerment of women around the world.

Goings was educated at Guilford College, and is the recipient of a Doctorate of Humane Letters honoris causa, from Rollins College, as well as a Doctorate in Business Administration honoris causa from Bryant College. He served in the U.S. Navy on the Destroyer, USS Power.

Rick and his wife Susan split their time today between their homes in Windermere, Florida and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Chair

Sarah Green Carmichael
Editor, Bloomberg Opinion

Sarah Green Carmichael is an editor and writer at Bloomberg Opinion. Previously, she was an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she led the podcast program, hosting the HBR IdeaCast and co-hosting Women at Work. She has also been a managing editor at Barron's, a baseball columnist, and a researcher for Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman at the Boston Globe. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University.

Speaker

Hal Gregersen
Executive Director, MIT Leadership Center, MIT Sloan School of Management

Hal Gregersen is executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT Sloan School of Management. A Thinkers50 globally ranked management thinker, he is the author of the Harvard Business Review article “Bursting the CEO Bubble” and co-author of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. Gregersen is also the founder of the 4-24 Project, an initiative dedicated to rekindling the provocative power of asking the right questions in adults so they can pass this crucial creativity skill onto the next generation. Putting his insight into practice, he is co-creator (with Sam Abell) of Leadership and the Lens: Learning at the Intersection of Innovation and Image-Making, an executive education experience through MIT Sloan Executive Education in association with Santa Fe Photographic Workshops.

Chair

Mehran Gul
Author, New Geography of Innovation

Mehran Gul is the Lead for Digital Enterprise at the World Economic Forum in Geneva. His work focuses on topics at the intersection of technology and business. Specifically, he works with global business leaders to develop strategies to ensure their digital transformation investments results in tangible outcomes. Mr Gul previously served as an Expert at the United National Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) where he advised governments on the role of higher education and entrepreneurship on industrial policy. He received his graduate degree in International Relations from Yale where he was a Fulbright scholar and a Fox International Fellow. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, a Global Leadership Fellow at the World Economic Forum, and a regional fellow with the Acumen Fund. He is a recipient of the McKinsey/Financial Times Bracken Bower prize for writers and is currently authoring a book on The New Geography of Innovation which charts the rise of global technology hubs. It will be published by HarperCollins in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US.

Speaker

Rita Gunther McGrath
Professor, Columbia Business School

Rita Gunther McGrath is a globally recognized expert on strategy, innovation, and growth with an emphasis on corporate entrepreneurship. Her work and ideas help CEOs and senior executives chart a pathway to success in today’s rapidly changing and volatile environments. McGrath is highly valued for her rare ability to connect research to business problems and in 2016 received the “Theory to Practice” award at the Vienna Strategy Forum.

Recognized consistently as one of the top 10 management thinkers by global management award Thinkers50, McGrath also received the award for outstanding achievement in the Strategy category. She is a highly sought after speaker at corporate events, such as the Yale CEO Summit, the Innosight CEO Summit and at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. McGrath has also been inducted into the Strategic Management Society “Fellows” in recognition of her impact on the field.

McGrath is often cited in the press, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and NPR’s Marketplace. She maintains an active social media presence, and has been rated one of the 25 smartest women to follow on Twitter by Fast Company Magazine. She consistently appears in rankings of the top business school professors to follow on Twitter. McGrath was voted HR Magazine’s Most Influential International Thinker, writes regularly for Fortune magazine’s online edition, is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s Experts column and blogs regularly at HBR.org.

McGrath is one of the most widely published authors in the Harvard Business Review, including the best-selling “Discovery Driven Planning” (1995), which was recognized as an early articulation of today’s “lean” startup philosophy and has been praised by Clayton Christensen as ‘one of the most important ideas in management – ever.’ Her related book, Discovery Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity (2009) is a deep dive into how to put the technique to work. Her next project, tentatively entitled Discovery Driven Advantage examines how companies can build true proficiency in innovation.

McGrath’s best-selling book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business, was recognized by Strategy+Business as the #1 business book of the year. She has co-authored two more books: MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth (2005); and The Entrepreneurial Mindset (2000), all published by Harvard Business Review Press. MarketBusters has been translated into ten languages and was named one of the best business books of 2013 by Strategy+Business.

Rita joined the faculty of Columbia Business School in 1993. Prior to life in academia, she was an IT director, worked in the political arena, and founded two startups. She received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She is married and is proud to be the mother of two delightful grownups.

Speaker

Valerie Hackl
Managing Director, Austro Control GmbH

Valerie Hackl has been Managing Director at Austro Control since January 2019 with a short-term appointment as Federal Minister for Transport, Innovation and Technology, as part of the transitional government in Austria in May/June 2019.

Austro Control is a public-private Austrian government company responsible for air traffic management in the Austrian airspace. The company scope ranges from air navigation services, certification of aircraft and commercial operators, pilot licenses, to the approval and management of drones.
Before joining Austro Control she was a Member of the Board at ÖBB-Personenverkehr AG in 2015, Austria's largest train and bus mobility service provider. Prior to this she was Head of Group Strategy at ÖBB-Holding AG and worked as a consultant at Bain & Company, one of the global leading management consulting companies.

Valerie is a native Austrian and studied Business Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and the University of British Columbia / Vancouver. She obtained her doctoral degree at the Swiss Research Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Gallen

Speaker

Rahaf Harfoush
Digital Anthropologist and author

Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthro-pologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. She is currently working on her third book entitled “Hustle & Float,” about our contemporary work culture and the realities of a post-work society. Her second book, “The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers,” was a NYT and USA Today Best Seller, and winner of a Gold Axiom Award.

Formerly, Rahaf was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Programme at the World Economic Forum in Geneva where she helped identify disruptive-startups that were improving the state of the world.

Rahaf is the founder of Red Thread Inc., Think Tank and Special Projects Agency that supports organizations in transforming digital trends into strategic opportunities. She teaches “Innovation & Emerging Business Models” at Sciences Po’s MBA program in Paris. She was recognized a top future thinker by the Hay Literary Festival and as a Young Global Shaper by the G20 Think Tank Summit. Rahaf is also named a Young Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum and a Rising Talent  by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society.

Speaker

Scott Hartley
Venture capitalist; start-up advisor

Scott Hartley is managing partner of Two Culture Capital and best-selling author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), a Financial Times business book of the month, and finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company's Bracken Bower Prize for an author under 35. He is a keynote speaker on the future of work, and human skills in our technology age. He has been a Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), and a Venture Partner at Compound. Prior to venture capital, Scott worked at Google, Facebook, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow. He has been a contributing author at MIT Press, and has written for publications such as The Financial Times and Foreign Policy, and been featured in USA Today, Harvard Business Review, PBS, BBC and The Wall Street Journal. He holds three degrees from Stanford and Columbia, has finished six marathon and Ironman 70.3 triathlons. He is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has visited over 70 countries.

Speaker

Sascha Haselmayer
Founder & CEO of Citymart

Sascha Haselmayer is the founder & CEO of Citymart. Trained as an architect and urbanist at the Architectural Association in London, Sascha is a social entrepreneur and leading expert in urban and government innovation committed to improving the quality of life and prospects of cities. After a stint in the UK’s disruptive privatization industry, Sascha went on to found several award-winning businesses and non-profit organizations to coordinate and channel the capacity of governments, investors, entrepreneurs, residents, nonprofits toward better outcomes. Today, his work has improved service and economic development outcomes in over 150 cities in 40 countries on all continents including New York City, London, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Cape Town, Fukuoka and Melbourne.

Sascha received many awards for his work including a prestigious Ashoka Fellowship for his public innovation work, is a trusted advisor to leading institutions such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation, 100 Resilient Cities and the UN Global Compact Cities Programme. He has published books and papers on urban and procurement innovation and has lectured on social entrepreneurship, city and government innovation at universities like the University of Chicago, London School of Economics & Political Science, the Architectural Association School of Architecture and the Copenhagen Business School.

Speaker

Caroline Hayes
Director of Strategy Implementation, Undergraduate Programs,
Hult International Business School

Caroline works with Hult campuses globally to create and implement policies and processes to meet the strategy of the School. She was also part of a small team that lead the school through four accreditations in one year, resulting in triple accreditation for the school.

Caroline is a certified Lego Serious Play (LSP) facilitator, and runs LSP workshops for Hult staff and students.

Speaker

Sabine Herlitschka
CEO, Infineon Technologies Austria

Sabine Herlitschka is Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Infineon Technologies Austria AG.

Her professional career includes industrial biotechnology research, international cooperation and financing in research technology and innovation, Internships at leading organizations in the USA, Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University/School of Advanced International Studies, as well as founding Vice-Rector for Research Management and International Cooperation at the Medical University of Graz/Austria.

Until 2011 she headed the European and International Programmes of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and was responsible for the operational implementation of the European Research and Technology Programmes in Austria, in particular the 7th EU Research Framework Programme.  In 2011 Herlitschka was appointed to the Management Board of Infineon Technologies Austria, in 2012 to the Management Board for Technology and Innovation and in April 2014 to the position of CEO.

For more than 20 years she has been frequently involved in European Research as advisor, project coordinator & proposal evaluator, as well as participant and Chairperson in various European & international expert groups, in particular member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development, University Councilor at the Vienna University of Technology, member of the Senate of the German Fraunhofer Society, as well as other research & innovation institutions. Since February 2018 she is Chairwoman of the Governing Board of the European Public Private Partnership ECSEL-Electronic Components and Systems for Electronic Leadership.

Herlitschka holds a Ph.D. in Food- and Biotechnology with Postdoc specialization in molecular biology and genetic engineering and an Master of Business Administration.

Speaker

Lisa W. Hershman
PTDO Chief Management Officer, US Department of Defense

Ms. Lisa W. Hershman is currently Performing the Duties of (PTDO) Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense. Ms. Hershman has been serving as the Deputy Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense. Ms. Hershman is a recognized thought leader in business transformation who brings extensive private sector expertise to her service in the Department of Defense.

She is the principal management officer for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense responsible for delivering optimized enterprise business operations to assure the success of the National Defense Strategy.

Ms. Hershman is responsible for ensuring that business transformation policies and programs are designed and managed to improve performance standards, efficiencies and effectiveness among the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Services, Combatant Commands, and Defense Agencies and Field Activities. Additionally, she oversees the collection and management of common, enterprise-wide data sets to drive best decision-making throughout the Department.

Ms. Hershman is a charter member of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Performance Improvement Council, and serves as the Performance Improvement Officer for the Department of Defense. She also serves as the Cross-Agency Priority goal leader for Category Management and Workforce of the 21st Century in support of the President’s Management Agenda.

Prior to her service to the Department of Defense, Ms. Hershman was Founder and CEO of The DeNovo Group, a business transformation and process management consultancy. She is the former CEO of Hammer and Company, serving as the successor to the late Dr. Michael Hammer; the MIT icon, best-selling author and founder of the field of business process reengineering. Ms. Hershman is co-author of the internationally acclaimed business book, Faster Cheaper Better, with Dr. Hammer and has been featured in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fox Business News, and Investors Business Daily.

In addition, Ms. Hershman served as Senior Vice President of Operational Excellence at Avnet, a global distributor of electronic components and technology systems. As the executive in charge of transformation and customer experience in 72 countries, her work was honored with the Avnet Corporate Chairman’s Award. Ms. Hershman began her career with General Electric, where she managed a portion of the Seawolf submarine program.

Her civic engagement includes serving as the 2017 Chairwoman of the Scrum Alliance, Vice
Chair of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, and as a member of Ball State University’s Miller School of Business Entrepreneurial Education Advisory Council.

Ms. Hershman earned her engineering and industrial distribution degree from Clarkson
University and has studied innovation with MIT and IMD and finance with Cornell.

Chair

Andrew Hill
Management Editor, Financial Times

Andrew Hill is an award-winning columnist and senior journalist at the Financial Times. As Associate Editor and Management Editor, he writes a weekly column on business, strategy and management, as well as contributing longer features and taking part in video discussions and podcasts. He is a regular public speaker and chair of panels on leadership and management.

Since joining the FT in 1988, Andrew has worked in various roles, including editor of the daily Lombard column on British business and finance, Financial Editor, Comment & Analysis Editor, New York Bureau Chief, Foreign News Editor, and correspondent in Brussels and Milan. He is a member of the FT’s Editorial Board.

Andrew was named Business Commentator of the Year 2016 in the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards and Best Commentator at the 2009 Business Journalist of the Year Awards, where he also received the Decade of Excellence award for sustained achievement in business and financial journalism.

His latest book is Ruskinland (Pallas Athene, 2019), a personal exploration of John Ruskin’s life, work and enduring influence on our world, published to coincide with the bicentenary of the great thinker’s birth. He is also the author of Leadership in the Headlines (FT Publishing, 2016), a selection of his FT columns and insights about how leaders lead.

Speaker

Werner Hoffmann
Head of Institute for Strategic Management,
WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Academic Director, MSc in Strategy, Innovation and Management Control
 
Senior Partner within Contrast EY-Parthenon Management Consulting Austria
 
President of Supervisory Board of the Austrian Controller-Institute

Numerous publications on the subject strategic management, strategic alliances and networks and business model innovation in leading international professional journals, for example „Strategic Management Journal“, „Long Range Planning“ and „Management International Review“

Speaker

Ulrich Hommel
Director Business School Development, EFMD GN

Ulrich Hommel is the Director of Business School Development at EFMD Global Network (GN) as well as Associate Director Quality Services at EFMD. In his role at EFMD GN, he is overseeing the establishment of professional development activities with a global footprint with the Executive Academy as the initial flagship offering. In EFMD Quality Services, a department that he has previously led as Director, he has been instrumental in the establishment of the EFMD Programme Accreditation System (EPAS), has piloted various strategic business development initiatives and has had a lead role in designing a wide range of accreditation policies for the EQUIS and EPAS systems. In the past, he was also the Director of EFMD’s Research & Surveys Unit and, in this role, has created a platform for researchers studying business schools with the Annual EFMD Higher Education Research Conference as a tangible feature.

Ulrich Hommel is a Professor of Finance at EBS Business School and heads the Chair of Corporate Finance & Higher Education Finance. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has been awarded a Dr. habil in Business Administration from the WHU, Germany. His current research focuses mainly on risk management, organizational resilience, venture capital & private equity as well as higher education management and financing. He has published more than 100 journal articles, books, edited volumes and contributions to edited works including articles in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Business Research, Annals of Operations Research, Venture Capital, Journal of Business Economics and the Journal of International Entrepreneurship. In addition, Ulrich Hommel has written extensively on business schools and is particularly interested in the interdependence of quality management (quality assurance, accreditation, risk management) and competitive positioning as well as institutional change.

Before joining EBS, he was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the WHU from 1994 to 1999. Ulrich Hommel has been Dean of EBS from 2000 to 2002 and has subsequently held the position of Rector and Managing Director from 2003 to 2006. In the past, he has held visiting appointments at Stockholm Business School (Stockholm University), the Stephen M. Ross School of Business (University of Michigan), the Krannert School of Management (Purdue University) and Bordeaux Business School.

Speaker

Kevin Hrusovsky
Founder and Chairman Powering Precision Health; CEO Quanterix

Kevin Hrusovsky is an acclaimed healthcare visionary and serial biotech entrepreneur, who founded Powering Precision Health, the nation’s first forum for advancing the deep science that powers precision health. He also founded Revolutionaries for Global Health in 2008.

Hrusovsky began on a mission 15 years ago to transform medicine from reactive ‘sick care’ to proactive, preventative, and personalized healthcare. Today, he relies on peer reviewed science and innovation to bring quantifiable evidence to the forefront and has catalyzed a science-based precision health movement across the globe. In 2016, he founded and launched the Powering Precision Health summit to address the continuum from health to disease at the molecular structure level in the human body. With his summit, Hrusovsky is leading the charge to establish a new paradigm for measuring life’s variables or biomarkers at a personal level by fostering collaboration among the world’s foremost doctors, researchers, scientists, innovators, patients, and policymakers. He identifies and focuses on three pillars of precision health: disease prevention, early detection, and precision treatments, with an overall vision to create a culture of health and wellness in our country where disease prevention guides our healthcare system and everyday living.

Hrusovsky is a recognized biotech and healthcare expert and analyst, offering the big picture view on achieving industry-wide transformation to true precision medicine. He has received many awards and accolades, including being dubbed as “as the unsung leader in the life sciences industry” with his 2017 BBJ Innovation All-Star recognition by the Boston Business Journal. Hrusovsky has been a guest expert on NECN, Bloomberg Radio, CNN, NPR Science Friday, ABC’s Good Morning America, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wall Street Journal, International Business Times, and The Washington Post.

A coveted thought leader and dynamic speaker, Hrusovsky is regularly invited to keynote at leading conferences and executive summits around the world, including the BIO International Convention, J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, One Mind Summit, Konkussion Retreat, and Next Generation Dx Summit, the annual conference of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, and World Innovation Forum.

Speakers/Chairs biosHrusovsky brings over twenty years of experience in life sciences and diagnostics with a strong track record for launching disruptive technologies, building fast-growing companies and developing successful commercialization strategies. He currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman at Quanterix, a company digitizing biomarker analysis to advance the science of precision health, and has sat or currently sits on the board of directors of several innovative technology companies including BioreclamationIVT, Caliper Life Sciences, 908 Devices, Cellaria, SeraCare, Xenogen and Solect Energy. He also serves (or served) on the Educational Board of the Massachusetts Biotech Council, the Advisory Committee for the Center for Biomedical Engineering at Brown University, the Association for Laboratory Automation, the JALA Editorial Board, and the Strategy Committee of Children’s Hospital Boston.

Prior to joining Quanterix, Hrusovsky was President of Life Sciences and Technologies at PerkinElmer, CEO of Caliper Life Sciences (now PerkinElmer), and CEO of Zymark Corporation (now PerkinElmer). Previously, Hrusovsky was President of FMC Corporation’s Pharmaceuticals and head of International Agricultural Products, and key management at E.I. DuPont de Nemours. He is credited with raising money, building billions of dollars of value and successfully monetizing via successful exits of nearly $1B of value.

Hrusovsky holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Ohio State University, and an M.B.A. from Ohio University where he was named the 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year. Hrusovsky received an Honorary Doctorate degree from Framingham State University for his vast contributions in life sciences and personal medicine. In addition, Hrusovsky attended Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness with his team at FMC and is a two-time EY Entrepreneur of the Year contestant. To stay connected to Kevin Hrusovsky, follow him on Twitter @KevinHrusovsky and LinkedIn @KevinHrusovsky.

Chair

Adi Ignatius
Editor-in-chief, Harvard Business Review Group

Adi Ignatius is Editor in Chief of the Harvard Business Review Group, where he has led the transformation of HBR, HBR.org, and HBR’s book-publishing unit. He launched HBR’s Future Economy Project last year to affirm the publication’s commitment to ambitious sustainability goals. Prior to joining HBR in 2009, Mr. Ignatius was the No. 2 editor at TIME.

He is the editor of two books: President Obama: The Path to the White House and Prisoner of the State: The Secret Diaries of Premier Zhao Ziyang. Both made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Mr. Ignatius lived and worked for nearly 20 years overseas. He was Editor of Time’s Asian edition and earlier served as Beijing Bureau Chief and Moscow Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker

Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño
Executive President of IE University

Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño is the President of IE University and a recognized influencer in global higher education. Iniguez is also the Vice-Chairman of Headspring, a company owned by the Financial Times and IE Business School providing custom education programs for companies worldwide.
 
Iniguez is the former Dean of IE Business School and has played a leading role in business education. He was portrayed by the Financial Times as “one of the most significant figures in promoting European business schools internationally”. He was the first European appointed as “Dean of the Year” by Poets & Quants (2017).
 
He serves on the boards of EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development), Renmin University Business School (China), Antai Business School (Jiao Tong University, China), LUISS Business School (Italy), Mazars University (France) and FGV-EASP Fundaçao Getulio Vargas (Brazil). He is a past Chair of the Board of AACSB.
 
He is the author of “The Learning Curve: How Business Schools Are Reinventing Education” (2011), “Cosmopolitan Managers: Executive Education That Works” (2016), and “In An Ideal Business: How the Ideas of 10 Female Philosophers bring Values, Meaning, and Innovation to the Workplace” (forthcoming 2020), as well as co-editor of “Business Despite Borders: Companies in the Age of Populist Anti-Globalization” (2018), all published by Palgrave Macmillan.
 
Iniguez is a regular speaker at international conferences and frequently contributes in different journals and media on higher education and executive development. He is one of the 500 Global LinkedIn Influencers and in 2019 has been recognized as the leading Spanish influencer in Management by the Mexican magazine Entrepreneur.
 
Iniguez is Professor of Strategic Management. He holds a Degree in Law, a Ph.D. in Moral Philosophy and Jurisprudence (Complutense University, Spain) and an MBA from IE Business School. He was a Recognized Student at the University of Oxford, UK.

Speaker

Reto Isenegger
Global Strategy Practice Leader, Advisory Services, EY

Reto Isenegger leads EY Advisory’s global Strategy practice across all industries. He has more than 25 years of experience in strategy development and strategic transformation - both in line management and consulting.

Together with EY’s think tank, EYQ, Reto and his team are exploring “What’s after what’s next?”, helping leaders anticipate the forces shaping the future and navigate through the transformative age. A particular expertise is advising corporates and governments on how to manage the duality dilemma: simultaneously optimizing performance today while laying the foundations for long-term value.

Reto joined EY from Credit Suisse where he spent 10 years firstly leading the Corporate & Business Development function in Switzerland, then acting as Chief Operating Officer for Switzerland.

In addition, Reto has served as a member of the Board of Directors for a Swiss regional bank and as Chairman of SVC Ltd.’s Board of Directors after being responsible for its going-live providing risk capital to small and medium sized enterprises.

Prior to working with Credit Suisse, Reto spent more than 10 years with international strategy consulting firms. He has led a broad range of strategy projects across multiple industries like telecommunications, life sciences, insurance and most prominently in the banking industry.

Reto holds a Master of Arts in Management

Speaker

Michael G. Jacobides
Professor of Strategy
London Business School

Michael G Jacobides holds the Sir Donald Gordon Chair of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at London Business School, where he is Professor of Strategy. He is Academic Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, Visiting Scholar at the New York Fed, and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge. A frequent keynote speaker, he engages in corporate, industry, and broad-appeal events such as TEDx and the Global Drucker Forum, and works with companies as they adjust to a shifting environment, and. He studies industry evolution, new business models, value migration and structural change in firms and sectors, and looks at how digital ecosystems transform the business context. He teaches strategy, innovation, transformation and turnarounds, and works on thought leadership with consultants such as McKinsey, IDEO, Accenture, PwC and Deloitte, and on strategy with corporates such as Santander, Zurich, CS, Airbus, Lufthansa, Vodafone, Nokia, DeBeers, Burberry, MerckSerono and the NHS. He advises disruptive start-ups and established firms alike, and has worked with policy makers in Europe and the US. He has visited Harvard, NYU, Cambridge, Imperial, Bocconi and Wharton, where he obtained his PhD, after studying at Athens, Cambridge and Stanford. His work has appeared in the top academic journals such as SMJ, AMJ, AMR, OrgSci and Industrial & Corporate Change, where he is a co-Editor, as well as HBR and FT, and appears on CNN and BBC. On policy, he has worked with the UK parliament (on the future of financial services), the European Council (on innovation in Europe) and has spearheaded RedesignGreece. He served on the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum, where he is the Academic Lead on the Digital Ecosystems project, and has presented in the Davos Annual meetings.

Speaker

Whitney Johnson
CEO, WLJ Advisors

One of the "50 Most Influential Management Thinkers in the World", Thinkers50. Former award-winning Wall Street equity analyst. Linkedin Top Voice in 2018 with 1.7 million followers. Helps high growth organizations build high growth individuals. World authority on personal disruption.

Whitney Johnson, one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world (Thinkers50), is an expert on helping high growth organizations develop high growth individuals. She is an award-winning author, word class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School’s Corporate Learning, and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. Whitney is a popular contributor for the Harvard Business Review. She has 1.7 million followers on Linkedin where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on the Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times. In 2019, she was ranked #3 on the Global Gurus' Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates as a “Top 15 Coach” by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith.

An innovation and disruption theorist, she is the author of the bestselling Build an A Team (Harvard Business Press, 2018), a Financial Times and CEO Read, Book of the Month, and the critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself (2015). Publisher's Weekly described it as "savvy...often counter-intuitive...superb" while the Boston Globe called it the "'What Color is Your Parachute?' career guide for the entrepreneurial age." In these books, she codifies her frameworks for developing high growth individuals and organizations––the Personal Disruption and the S Curve of Learning frameworks.

Whitney was the co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard's Clayton Christensen, where they invested in and led the $8 million seed round for Korea's Coupang, currently valued at $9+ billion. She was involved in fund formation, capital raising, and the development of the fund's strategy. As a former award-winning Wall Street stock analyst, she understands momentum and growth. She was an Institutional Investor-ranked equity research analyst for eight consecutive years and was rated by Starmine as a superior stock-picker.

Whitney hosts the weekly Disrupt Yourself Podcast, is married and has two children. For more information please visit www.whitneyjohnson.com.

Speaker

Michael Joseph
Chairman, Kenya Airways

Michael Joseph is currently Chairman of Kenya Airways, a position he has held since October 2016. He is also a non-executive Director on the Boards of Vodacom Group South Africa, MFS Africa and Safaricom Limited. Michael is also an advisor to the Vodafone Group mostly related to mobile financial services and Safaricom. He was until recently (October 2017) employed by Vodafone Group Services Limited as the Director of Mobile Money and was responsible for leading the strategic growth and development of successful M-Pesa proposition across the Vodafone footprint.

Michael was the founding CEO of Safaricom Limited, steering the company from a subscriber base of less than 18,000 in 2000 to over 17 million subscribers at his retirement in November 2010 making it the most successful company in East Africa. This phenomenal growth straddling nearly a decade was notable for the launch of many innovative products and services and he was behind the launch of the highly successful launch and phenomenal growth of M-Pesa and its related services. 

Michael has been the recipient of many awards, including CEO of the year awarded by the Kenya Institute of Management, the Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear (awards given by the President of Kenya to those who have made a positive impact in Kenya).  He has extensive international experience in company start-ups, the implementation and operation of large wireless and wire-line networks. He is also a keen conservationist and serves as Chairman of Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, a leading conservancy in Northern Kenya

Chair

Gabriel Joseph-Dezaize
Editor in chief, Harvard Business Review France

Gabriel Joseph-Dezaize, 58, is the chief editor of Harvard Busines Review France. He studied Political Sciences in Grenoble (France) and he is also a guitar player and composer

Speaker

Louise Juhl
Marketing & Communications Director, Copenhagen Capacity

Louise Juhl is Marketing & Communication Director at Copenhagen Capacity; the official inward investment agency for the Greater Copenhagen metropolitan region. She is responsible for the global marketing and branding of Greater Copenhagen to attract foreign investors, businesses and talent.

Louise is passionate about e-marketing and digital customer journeys, and she is always scouting for new trends and communities which could become Greater Copenhagen’s next stronghold, able to successfully attract international business and talent.

Louise has previously headed e-marketing teams and strategy at Novo Nordisk, leading design and furniture manufacturer Fritz Hansen, as well as large advertising and relationship building agencies in Denmark. She holds a Master of Science, Multimedia Systems, from London Metropolitan University.

Speaker

So-Young Kang
Founder & CEO, Gnowbe

So-Young is the Founder and CEO of Gnowbe, a mobile micro-learning and employee experience solution that builds learning journeys for p­rofessionals in a bite-sized, experiential way. She is also Founding Chairman of Awaken Group, a multi-disciplinary Transformation Design (TD) firm that integrates strategy, leadership and innovation to design experiences that catalyze change. So-Young has nearly 20 years of experience advising and training leaders globally and is a sought-after speaker across US, Asia, Middle East and Africa on various topics across leadership, innovation and transformation.

So-Young is a nominated Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF) since 2014, global speaker, and author of 'Inside Out: Conversations about Leadership and Innovation in a New Global Economy." She is a regular contributor to the WEF and currently sits on the World Economic Forum Global Council for the Korean Peninsula, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower HR Transformation Committee and on the boards of LNKM, Young Professionals’ Group and GeniusU. Prior experiences include McKinsey and Citibank.

So-Young is a Korean-American living between Singapore and the US. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA with honors from the University of Pennsylvania.
 
Twitter: @soykang
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soykang/
Website: https://www.so-youngkang.com/

Speaker

Caroline Kant
Founder and CEO of EspeRare

After building an IT start-up in Silicon Valley and a successful career in R&D within the pharmaceutical industry, Caroline has become a world class social entrepreneur in 2013 by establishing the EspeRare foundation. Her groundbreaking philanthropic venture is reshaping the way treatments are being developed and distributed for children suffering from orphan diseases. She is also advising the ICRC and the UN to find ways to apply venture philanthropy to other health challenges. Caroline was educated in Geneva and the US and holds degrees in neurobiology and product development, she is, among others, an ASHOKA fellow and was appointed Swiss women entrepreneur of the year in 2015.

Speaker

Bernhard Kerres
Former Opera Singer & Silcion Valley Entrepreneur

Chair

Julia Kirby
Senior Editor, Harvard University Press

Julia Kirby has been with Harvard Business Review for over a decade and in that time worked with hundreds of expert authors to bring their ideas to the magazine’s managerial audience. Marketing management and strategy are particular areas of interest; she stays on top of the issues facing marketers in leading firms and seeks out new academic research with important managerial implications. She is also the author of a book (with Christopher Meyer) on how the rules of capitalism will change as the center of gravity of global commerce shifts to emerging economies: “Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere“

Chair

Art Kleiner
Editor-in-chief, Strategy+Business, PWC

Art Kleiner is the Editor-in-Chief of strategy+business, the award-winning management magazine published by PwC’s Strategy&. Art most recently has published The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (2008) and Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success (2003).

He is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and a faculty member at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches courses on the future of new media.

Speaker

Noboru Konno
President Japan Innovation Network

Noboru Konno is Professor of Tama Graduate School, Guest Professor of Graduate School (SDM) of Keio University, He also serves as Representative Executive of Japan Innovation Network and President of EcosyX Lab, Inc. He has been involved in numerous projects for knowledge industries, design strategy projects. His recent studies are around “knowledge ecology”. It includes knowledge creation and its place (concept of “ba”) and “Purpose Engineering”. His books include “Design Thinking For Business” and co-authored books with Ikujiro Nonaka “The Principles of Knowledge Creation Management”, “Conceptualizing Capability—Drawing a Big Picture” and others.

Speaker

Georg Kopetz
Co-Founder and member of the Executive Board, TTTech

Georg Kopetz is co-founder and member of the executive board at TTTech. He is responsible for the overall strategy of the corporation, marketing, sales, finance, human resources, the business units aerospace and industrial solutions as well as for the off-highway joint-venture company TTControl. He studied law at the University of Vienna and has comprehensive professional experience in the financial and legal field, having worked as a finance and law consultant in Austria and abroad.

Speaker

Mikko Kosonen
President, Sitra – the Finnish Innovation Fund

Speaker

Philip Kotler
S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Philip Kotler is the S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg™ School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Kellogg was voted the “Best Business School” for six years in Business Week’s survey of U.S. business schools. It is also rated as the “Best Business School for the Teaching of Marketing.” Professor Kotler has significantly contributed to Kellogg’s success through his many years of research and teaching there.

He received his Master’s Degree at the University of Chicago and his PhD Degree at MIT, both in economics. He did post-doctoral work in mathematics at Harvard University and in behavioral science at the University of Chicago.

Professor Kotler is the author of 57 books including: Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control, the most widely used marketing book in graduate business schools worldwide; Principles of Marketing; Marketing Models; Strategic Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations; The New Competition; High Visibility; Social Marketing; Marketing Places; Marketing for Congregations; Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism; The Marketing of Nations; Kotler on Marketing, Building Global Biobrands, Attracting Investors, Ten Deadly Marketing Sins, Marketing Moves, Market Your Way to Growth, Winning Global Markets, and Confrontiing Capitalism. He has published over one hundred and fifty articles in leading journals, several of which have received best-article awards.

Professor Kotler was the first recipient of the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) “Distinguished Marketing Educator Award” (1985). The European Association of Marketing Consultants and Sales Trainers awarded Kotler their prize for “Marketing Excellence”. He was chosen as the “Leader in Marketing Thought” by the Academic Members of the AMA in a 1975 survey. He also received the 1978 “Paul Converse Award” of the AMA, honoring his original contribution to marketing. In 1989, he received the Annual Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award. In 1995, the Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI) named him “Marketer of the Year.” In 2011, he was given the title of being a Legend in Marketing; in 2012, he was #1 on the Management A-List of Academics; in 2013 he became the first recipient of the William L. Wilkie American Marketing Association Foundation’s “Marketing for a Better World” Award for significant contributions to marketing theory and practice; also in 2013, he was inducted in the Management Hall of Fame; also in 2013, he became the first recipient of the Sheth Foundation Medal for Exceptional Contribution to Marketing Scholarship and Practice.

Professor Kotler has consulted for such companies as IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Honeywell, Bank of America, Merck and others in the areas of marketing strategy and planning, marketing organization and international marketing.

He has been Chairman of the College of Marketing of the Institute of Management Sciences, a Director of the American Marketing Association, a Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute, a Director of the MAC Group, a former member of the Yankelovich Advisory Board, and a member of the Copernicus Advisory Board. He is a Member of the Board of Governors of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Member of the Advisory Board of the Drucker Foundation. He has received honorary doctoral degrees from the Stockholm University, University of Zurich, Athens University of Economics and Business, DePaul University, the Cracow School of Business and Economics, Groupe H.E.C. in Paris, the University of Economics and Business Admininstration in Vienna, Budapest University of Economic Science and Public Administration, and the Catholic University of Santo Domingo.

He has traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia and South America, advising and lecturing to many companies about how to apply sound economic and marketing science principles to increase their competitiveness. He has also advised governments on how to develop and position the skill sets and resources of their companies for global competition.

Education
PhD, 1956, Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MA, 1953, Economics, University of Chicago

Academic Positions
S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1988-present
Harold T. Martin Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1973-1987
Montgomery Ward Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1969-1972
Associate Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1965-1968
Assistant Professor of Market, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1962-1964

Honors and Awards
Honorary Doctorate, Plekhanov Russian Academyu of Economics
16th Place in Ratings of Top Global Management Gurus, Global Gurus Organization and Management Gurus.Net
Marketing for a Better World, American Marketing Association
Wroe Alderson Distinguished Lecturer, Wharton School
Schaffner Award, Kellogg School of Management
Sheth Foundation Medal for Exceptional Contribution to Markeitng Scholarship and Practice, Sheth Foundation
Badge of Honor of Officer of the Order of Academic Palms, Order of the Academic Palms
Management Hall of Fame, www.thinkers50.com
Honorary Doctorate Degree, HHL, Leipzig, Germany, 2012
Ranked first on the A-List of Management Academics, 2011
Kellogg Alumni Professor of the Year Award, Kellogg School of Management, 1991

Speaker

Janka Krings-Klebe
Co-Founder and Managing Partner at co-shift GmbH

Janka Krings-Klebe is a successful entrepreneur and author. Her expertise is based on over 20 years of industrial transformation practices in multinational companies, from leading transformation projects and effective technology rollouts, coaching of national and international entities during implementation up to design and implementation of group-wide transformation strategies.
In 2016 she co-founded co-shift GmbH, an owner-led consultancy supporting companies from all branches in digital transformation and business ecosystems. Janka works with companies to improve coporate innovation frameworks and to build business ecosystems to adapt for higher market dynamics.

Janka is driven by a strong vision of a new social contract to balance the needs of society, companies and individuals in the digital age. She has a deep understanding of new ways of managing all levels of business to meet the challenges ahead.
The most recent book Janka co-authored is „Future Legends - Business in Hyper-Dynamic Markets“ [with Jörg Schreiner & Joachim Heinz], creating a setup for future business ecosystems.

Janka Krings-Klebe holds a Dr.-Ing. in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany) and acting chairwoman of the Digital Transformation committee of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK) Stuttgart (Germany).

Speaker

Wolfgang Lassl
Associate Partner, Pure Management Group

Wolfgang Lassl, MALD, MTh, is an associate partner at Pure Management Group and works as a management advisor, author, and educator. He is a specialist in organizational design and transformation processes. Wolfgang Lassl advises organizations in the private, public, and non-profit sector. In 2019, he published a book on the factors constituting organizational viability as well as one on organizational diagnosis and governance. Both books were published by Springer Nature. He is an associate member of the Peter Drucker Society Europe.

Apart from his passion for management issues, his second main area of interest is philosophy. He holds a Master’s degree in Theology as well as in International Relations (Fulbright scholarship). He looks back at teaching and research assignments at Tufts University, University of Vienna and Salzburg.

Speaker

Axelle Lemaire
Global Head of Terra Numerata; Partner at Roland Berger

Axelle Lemaire is the Global Head of Terra Numerata and a Partner at Roland Berger. She helps connect with an ecosystem of +90 qualified startups to enhance classic consulting and build enriched offers for clients in a collaborative and partnership mode.

Axelle is a public figure in France – she was a French Government member until March 2017, where she held the position of Minister in charge of Innovation and Digital. She left office with an acclaimed appraisal for her action. In parallel with her activities at Roland Berger, Axelle continues to be involved in causes related to education, civic tech and technologies for the benefit of the common good (tech for good). She is the proud mother of three children.

Speaker

Carsten Linz
Group Digital Officer, BASF SE

Dr. Carsten Linz leads the Digitalization of Businesses & Functions at BASF as Group Digital Officer, he is author of 'Radical Business Model Transformation', advisory member of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Digital Enterprise' and ‘Digital Platforms and Ecosystems’ projects and teaches in executive programs at Mannheim Business School, European School of Management & Technology Berlin, University of St. Gallen, and Stanford Graduate School.

Speaker

Helmut List
Chairman and CEO, AVL List GmbH

Helmut List was born in Graz, Austria, in 1941. He is a graduate of the Graz University of Technology. Since 1966 he has worked at AVL. In 1970, as Vice President, he set up a new division which comprised all test system activities. Since 1979 he has been Chairman & CEO of AVL List GmbH.

Under his leadership, AVL has expanded into a global company with a worldwide network of technical centers and affiliates. At the same time, the business focus had broadened from the combustion engine to include the whole powertrain, encompassing electric drivetrains, hybrids, fuel cell, transmissions and batteries. Today AVL is the world’s largest independent company for the development, simulation and testing technology of powertrains for passenger cars, trucks and large engines as well as vehicle integration and autonomous driving, with 10,400 employees worldwide.

Helmut List held and partly still holds a wide range of industrial and public positions at national and international level. He was inter alia Chairman of the Industrial Research and Development Advisory Committee (IRDAC), Vice-Chairman of European Road Transport Research Advisory Council (ERTRAC) and for ten years Chairman of the Board of the Technical University Graz. Helmut List has received numerous national and international awards and honors.

Chair

Isabella Mader
Executive Advisor, Global Peter Drucker Forum CEO, Excellence Institute

Isabella Mader, MSc, is CEO of the Excellence Institute, Executive Advisor for the Global Peter Drucker Forum and lecturer at universities in the fields of information and knowledge management, IT- strategy and collaboration. 

2013 she was awarded “Top CIO of the Year“ (A).

Before her current position she built up a post graduate university programme that she then managed for several years. She also acted as the CEO of a software company (booking platform) and at the United Nations in the field of methodology development.

At the Excellence Institute she concentrates on knowledge management, information management, IT strategy, communities and networks as well as on network economy/sharing economy and New Work.

Speaker

Thomas Madreiter
Director of Planning, City of Vienna

Personal:
year of birth: 1967, in Radstadt (Salzburg) - Austria.

Married, two children

Study of spatial planning at the Vienna University of Technology.

Work Experience:
After the study, one year assistent at the Institute of Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the Vienna University of Technology (Prof. Wilfried Schönbäck).

From 1995 to 2001 in the urban development Vienna with the focal point Management of urban development processes.

From 2001 to 2005 assistent to the Vice Mayor and Vice-Governor, Executive City Councillor for Finance, Economic Affairs and Vienna Public Utilities of Vienna, Dr. Sepp Rieder.

From 2005 to 2013 Head of the department for Urban Development and Planning in Vienna.

2011 interim Head of the department for Energyplanning in Vienna.

Since January 2013 Director of Planning of the City of Vienna

Speaker

Cécile Maisonneuve
President, Fabrique de la Cité

Cécile Maisonneuve is Chairman of La Fabrique de la Cité, the urban innovation think tank since 2015. She is a member of the scientific board of the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS). She is a Senior Advisor to the Centre for Energy of the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI).

She previously headed the Centre for Energy of IFRI. From 2007 to 2012, Cécile has held several positions in the AREVA group, dedicated to international prospective and public affairs. Cécile Maisonneuve began her career in 1997 in the French National Assembly as a civil servant, working successively for the Defence, the Law and the Foreign Affairs Committees.

Cécile Maisonneuve graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Paris Institute of Political studies, and the Sorbonne Paris IV-University in history. She has a long collaboration with various French and international think tanks. She is the author of several research papers on energy and of a biography on Benjamin Franklin (2008). A former participant in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the U.S. Department of State, she is a member of Vox Femina, an association promoting women’s empowerment as experts in media.

Speaker

Daniela Mars
International Trevor James Low Flutes Artist

Daniela Mars is an International Trevor James Low Flutes Artist and the creator behind the Mars Bass Flute Project, a project that showcases works by living composers from around the world for the bass flute.

Daniela comes from Brazil and enjoys a diverse musical life as a soloist, freelance and chamber musician. She currently lives in Paris, France, where she is the principal flute of Ensemble K and flute teacher at L’École de Musique de Brétigny. She is engaged in giving workshops at various musical institutions in Paris, including masterclasses in Brazil and Spain.

Daniela has mastered her art at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, City University, Prayner Konservatorium of Arts in Vienna  and Lyon Conservatory in France. She has performed in masterclasses by internationally renowned flautists such as Pierre-Yves Artaud, Paul Edmund-Davies, Wissam Boustany, and in 2016 she was a Straubinger Scholarship recipient allowing her to study with Jasmine Choi during her International Masterclass in Bregenz, Austria.

Chair

Mary Meaney
Senior Partner McKinsey & Company

Profile

• Mary Meaney is a Senior Partner in McKinsey’s Paris Office.  She is co-Convener of McKinsey’s Organisation Practice globally, and the co-author of Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths.  Over the last 20+ years, she has served leading pharma, consumer products, energy, basic materials, telecommunications, and public sector organisations on their most important transformation, change management, top team alignment and performance improvement efforts.

Recent relevant studies and experiences

• Led the top team alignment and cultural change programme for a major consumer products company, leading to a five-fold increase in their share price over a 5 year timeframe.
• Led the development and implementation of the performance turn-around of a major public sector organisation, identifying and helping to capture over £2.6 billion in cost reductions while maintaining effectiveness.
• Led the performance transformation of a large industrial company, including diagnosing, architecting and leading the major operational, commercial and cultural change programmes which resulted in a 38% improvement in EBITDA and over $1bn additional value to the company.
• She has led McKinsey’s major research effort on change, and has published a suite of reports, McKinsey on Organization on Change, Agility and Talent.  She has given lectures at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LBS, and Princeton, and is an Adjunct Lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
• She is the founder and leader of the McKinsey women’s initiative in EMEA and sponsors McKinsey’s Women as Leaders program, Remarkable Women’s Program, Senior Executive Women’s Masterclass.

Education and prior work experience

• Mary sits on the Advisory Board of Imperial Business School and was previously on the Board of TeachFirst.  She graduated Summa cum Laude with a BA in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University.  She won the Rhodes scholarships and earned a D.Phil in Politics from the University of Oxford.
• She lives with her husband, Ian, and six children in France

Speaker

Miriam Meckel
Founding publisher of ada, the platform for digital life and the economy of the future, at Handelsblatt Media Group

Miriam Meckel, PhD, is the founding publisher of ada, the platform for digital life and the economy of the future, at Handelsblatt Media Group. Previously she had been editor-in-chief since 2014 and publisher of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany's most important weekly magazine for business in Düsseldorf, since 2017. Miriam Meckel has been Professor of Corporate Communication at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland since 2005. She was Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Visiting Professor at the Singapore Management University for several years. Miriam Meckel received the Cicero Speaker Award in the category "Science", published numerous books, scientific journal articles and journalistic articles.

Speaker

Timo Meynhardt
Professor for Business Psychology and Leadership,
HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management

Timo Meynhardt is full professor and chairholder of the Dr. Arend Oetker Chair of Business Psychology and Leadership at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management and managing director of the Center for Leadership and Values in Society at the University of St. Gallen. In his research, he links psychological and business management topics, especially Public Value management, leadership and competency diagnostics. He is strongly committed to re-search in the field of public value as well as to the application of the concept in business and administration. Timo was the first researcher to apply the concept to the private  sector. He developed a unique public value theory, which conceptualizes public value as “a necessary fiction” for individuals and groups.

Timo publishes the Public Value Atlas for Switzerland and Germany (www.gemeinwohl-atlas.de, www.gemeinwohl.ch), which aims at ranking and making transparent the public value of companies and organizations. He also developed a Public Value Scorecard, which provides a management tool to measure public value creation along five basic dimensions. Together with Ernst & Young Ltd., he launched a public value award for start-ups. He also chairs the public value award for public baths in Germany.

Chair

Katharina Moser
Sociopolitical entrepreneur; Founder, MOSAIK - Designing European Experiences

Katharina Moser is a sociopolitical entrepreneur based in Vienna, AT with 15 years of experience in developing projects that foster a European spirit. After her studies, she worked for the Austrian Foreign Ministry, the British Council London and the European Forum Alpbach. In 2015 she founded MOSAIK – an agency for creative formats on Europe, two of its major projects being: COME ON OVER! – a card game/ communication tool with fun facts on Europe, or the one-day-event Routes – The European journey in your city that let participants experience European countries in their own city (Austrian State Award on Europe & European Citizens’ Prize). MOSAIK designed events and formats for the Austrian Federal Chancellery, EUSALP or the city of Kassel. Moser gives keynote speeches on how to foster a European identity, facilitates events as a moderator and holds workshops on creative event management.

Speaker

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
Author, Speaker, Advisor

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez (antonionietorodriguez.com) a thought leader, author, practitioner, and professor. He is the creator of concepts such as the Hierarchy of Purpose, featured by Harvard Business Review, or the Project Manifesto; which argues that projects are the lingua franca of the business and personal worlds from the C-suite to managing your career or relationships.

He is author of “The Project Revolution” (LID, 2019). "Lead Successful Projects" (Penguin, 2019) and “The Focused Organization” (Taylor & Francis, 2014). His research and global impact in modern management been recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award "Ideas into Practice".

Antonio was the Chairman of the Project Management Institute in 2016, were he co-founded the Brightline Initiative. He has recently launched the Strategy Implementation Insititute. Antonio has held leadership positions in PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas Fortis and GlaxoSmithKline. He is a visiting Professor of Duke Corporate Education and IE Business School.

Born in Madrid, Spain, and educated in Germany, Mexico, Italy and the United States, Antonio is an Economist with an MBA from London Business School and Insead's International Director Program. He is fluent in five languages.

Speaker

Tony O'Driscoll
Adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business;
Research Fellow at Duke CE

Tony O’Driscoll is an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a Research Fellow at Duke CE. This dual-role affords Tony the opportunity to operate at the intersection of cutting-edge academic research in business and real-world business challenges faced by leaders.

During his 18-year corporate career, Tony held several strategic leadership positions. He was a founding member of IBM Global Service’s Strategy and Change consulting practice where he consulted at the highest level with business executives on creating sustainable competitive advantage in increasingly complex environments. He also served as a member IBM’s Almaden Services Research group where he investigated the changing roles of leadership, innovation, and collaboration as enterprises become more global, virtual, open and digitally mediated.
 
Tony has authored and co-authored articles for business periodicals such as Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, Strategy and Business, CLO Magazine and Dialogue. His current research examines how rapidly emerging technologies are disrupting existing industry structures and business models. He specifically focuses on how to develop leadership systems that enable organizations to adapt and evolve in increasingly unpredictable and turbulent business environments. 

Speaker

Sharon Olivier
Professor of Leadership, Hult Ashridge Business School

Sharon teaches, researches & consults Strategic HR; Leading in the 21st century, Ego, Eco and Intuitive intelligence in leadership, Engagement, Polarity Management, Diversity and Inclusion, The neuro-science of reframing unhelpful patterns, and Heart Intelligence.
 
Before Ashridge, Sharon spent 20 years as a Senior Leader/ OD consultant/Learning Facilitator/Coach/Speaker. She started her career as Senior HR Leader in the Motor Industry, then led Human Capacity Building for a large consulting company, after which she established a successful consulting practice (Impact Consulting) in South Africa.  Clients have included Ipsen Pharmaceuticals, NATO, Lufthansa, Egyptian Banking Council, VW, Audi, BMW, Land Rover, De Beers, Anglo America, Sage Life, University of Johannesburg and Sasol International.

Sharon holds a MA in Industrial Psychology.  She is a Master Practitioner in NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and a PNI practitioner (psychoneuroimmunology). She has established a record of accomplishment as an inspirational speaker at conferences on the topics of the Future of HR and new logics needed to lead the 21st century organisation.  She has co-published a book on Personal Resilience “Diamonds in the Dust” and a chapter in the latest Ashridge leadership 2017 book “Inspiring Leadership” on The Engagement Dilemma and the use of Ego and Eco Leadership Intelligence. Sharon has recently led or co-authored research into on Ego, Eco and Intuitive leadership, Engagement in Work Teams and Mindful leadership

Chair

Alexander Osterwalder
Entrepreneur and Business Model Innovator, Co-Founder Strategyzer

One of the world’s most influential proponents of business model innovation and value proposition design, Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder provides a framework for large companies and startups to innovate by rapidly experimenting with new business models and value propositions. He is co founder of Strategyzer, an innovation powerhouse that helps organizations develop growth engines, better customer understanding, more attractive value propositions and powerful business models via online applications and blended online/offline courses.

Osterwalder invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, Culture Map, and Business Portfolio Map, to help business people with practical tools to help address important strategic jobs. He simplifies the strategy development process, turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. As a result, a better language for identifying and communicating value is created and disseminated throughout an organization. Osterwalder’s talks – which illuminate the application of these practical tools with current market examples – consistently rank first or second among his peers at global conferences. By punctuating his informative speeches with humor and interactive exercises, Osterwalder establishes a deep and direct connection with audiences ranging from five to 5,000 and beyond, commanding high levels of participation, engagement and enthusiasm. His speeches further reveal how his business model and value proposition frameworks allow companies to grasp and maintain a competitive advantage in the midst of a crowded, or previously uncharted, industry.

A passionate entrepreneur, in 2010, Osterwalder co-founded Strategyzer, a leading innovation powerhouse that helps organizations develop growth engines, improve customer understanding, and establish more attractive value propositions and business models. His world-renowned Business Model Canvas is trusted by more than five million business practitioners from leading global companies, such as Coca-Cola, GE, Mastercard, Ericsson, Fujitsu, 3M, Intel and Microsoft, and is outlined in his international best-seller, “Business Model Generation” (Wiley, 2010), which was named among the 12 best business books of all time by USA Today. His second book, “Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want” (Wiley, 2014), continues the conversation by addressing how to find a better fit between a product and its intended market.

Osterwalder won the 2015 strategy award from Thinkers50 and currently ranks #7 among the top 50 business thinkers of the world. In 2013, he won the European Union’s inaugural Innovation Luminary Award. A frequent keynote speaker at Fortune 500 companies, Osterwalder travels the world discussing his ideas and strategies at leading universities such as Wharton, Stanford, Berkeley, IESE, MIT, KAUST and IMD. He holds a doctorate from HEC Lausanne, Switzerland, and is a founding member of The Constellation, a global not-forprofit organization aimed at eliminating HIV/AIDS and Malaria.

Speaker

Peter Oswald
CEO Mondi Group

Peter began his career with Deutsche Bank and automotive company KTM. He joined the Mondi Group in 1992 as the head of internal audit of subsidiary Frantschach, later becoming corporate controller.

After serving as chief executive of the bag and flexibles business from 1995 to 2001, he was appointed chief executive of Mondi Packaging Europe in 2002, leading its subsequent integration with Frantschach into the new Mondi packaging division in 2004. Having held a number of senior executive roles within Mondi, Peter was appointed chief executive officer of the Europe & International Division in January 2008. In 2013 he was voted European CEO and Global CEO of the paper industry by RISI. In May 2017 Peter became Group CEO.

He was a member of the supervisory board of Telekom Austria AG between 2008 and 2014 and of MIBA AG between 2014 and 2015, as well as chairman of the supervisory board of OMV (2015-2016). From 2016-2017 Peter chaired the European paper association CEPI.

Peter graduated in law from the University of Vienna with honours and in business administration from WU-Vienna Business School.

Speaker

Kristianne Paasche
Special advisor cluster development and policies

Strategic change maker through business model innovation.

Strong believer in building competitive edge through stronger cooperation between people across organizational borders.

Former C-level manager and entrepreneur. Now in Innovation Norway – a governmental agencies that promotes innovation through financial and competence support schemes for Norwegian start-ups and scale-ups. Responsible for the major refurbishment of the Norwegian Innovation Cluster Program bringing it into the future as a significant business tool and strong contribution for economic growth.

Speaker

Peter Paschek
Management Consultant

Peter Paschek (born October 1949, Homberg/Lower Rhine , Germany), Studies in Social Sciences and Economics in Germany , UK and USA (Dipl. soc oec.).

Management Consultant since 1979. From 1976 to 1979, scientific staff member, Chair of Sociology I (Prof. Dr. J. Papalekas), Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

In 2015 Paschek continued his work as Management and Executive Search Consultant as free lancer , after operating as Managing Partner and Co-Owner of Delta Management Consultants GmbH for more than 20 years.

His academic teaching activities (St. Gallen Iniversity till 2013, and particularly at Technical University Munich) kept him constantly connected with academia.

Paschek is a disciple of Prof. Dr. Peter F. Drucker , who was friend and advisor to him for nearly 30 years. In 2004 both edited a book, titled „Kardinaltugenden effektiver Führung“ which was translated in Chinese, Korean and Portuguese.

Paschek‘s newest book , titled „Peter F. Drucker- memories of a conservative christian Anarchist“, will be published end of 2019.

Speaker

Gianpiero Petriglieri
Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD

Gianpiero Petriglieri (@gpetriglieri) is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. He directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship Executive Education programme for emerging leaders. He is an Academic Director of the INSEAD Initiative for Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence.

Gianpiero’s research interests bridge the domains of leadership, identity, and learning. His work focuses on how and where people become mindful, effective, and responsible leaders. He is particularly concerned with the development of leadership in the age of "nomadic professionalism," in which authenticity and mobility have replaced loyalty and advancement as hallmarks of virtue and success.

In this context, he contends, a narrow focus on the acquisition of new knowledge and skills is inadequate to develop competent and trustworthy leaders. His research casts a light on the psychological, social, and cultural functions of leadership development. His innovative teaching methods provide an example of how to perform these functions purposefully for the benefit of individuals, organisations, and society at large.

Gianpiero’s research has appeared, or is forthcoming, in leading academic journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Learning & Education, and Organization Studies. His work on the personal foundations of leader's development received the GMAC Award for the most significant contribution to graduate management education and the Best Article Award of the Academy of Management Learning & Education. Gianpiero writes regularly for the Harvard Business Review, and for four of the past five years, his essays have been included among the "ideas that shaped management". His work has been featured in various media including the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and Businessweek. He has chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on new models of leadership and was shortlisted for the Leadership Award by Thinkers50, the ranking of the most influential management thinkers in the world.

Building on his research, Gianpiero has contributed to refining a unique approach to experiential leadership development that aims to deepen and accelerate the development of individual leaders as well as to broaden and strengthen leadership communities within and across organisations. Besides the Management Acceleration Programme, he directs customised leadership development programmes for multinationals in a variety of industries. He also speaks widely on how to develop and exercise leadership in fast-changing, uncertain, and diverse workplaces.

Gianpiero taught the Leading People and Groups core course in the INSEAD MBA programme for five years, receiving the Outstanding Teacher Award. He currently teaches the Practical Wisdom in Business core course. He has received numerous Dean's Commendations for Teaching Excellence in both MBA and Executive Education programmes. He has held visiting professor positions at the Harvard Business School and at Copenhagen Business School. Prior to joining INSEAD, he contributed regularly to executive education and MBA programmes at the IMD in Switzerland. 



Gianpiero holds a Medical Doctorate and a specialisation in Psychiatry from the University of Catania Medical School, Italy, and a diploma in Advanced Organizational Consultation from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. He has practiced as a psychotherapist and served on the staff of group relations conferences in Europe and the United States.'

Speaker

Jennifer Petriglieri
Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD

Jennifer Petriglieri is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at  INSEAD, and the author of  Couples That Work, a forthcoming book on how dual-career couples can thrive in love and in work.

Her award-winning research and teaching focus on identity, leadership, and career development. She is particularly interested in how people’s close relationships shape who they become professionally and personally, and how moments of uncertainty and crisis make us who we are.

Jennifer was shortlisted for the  Thinkers50  New Thinker and Talent awards, and named one of the world’s best 40 business school professors under 40 by  Poets & Quants.

Her research has appeared in the  Administrative Science Quarterly,  Academy of Management Review,  Academy of Management Learning & Education, and the  Journal of Organizational Change Management. It has also been featured in the Business Week  and the  Harvard Business Review.

Jennifer has long been involved in experiential leadership development initiatives for multinationals from a variety of industries. Her work in this domain pays particular attention to the interplay between individual’s life stories and group memberships and their decision-making and professional style in leadership roles. At INSEAD she directs the    and the  Women Leaders Programme,  alongside numerous customised leadership programmes for multinationals.

A British citizen, Jennifer earned a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from INSEAD. She also holds an MBA from IMD, Switzerland, and a BSc in genetics from Nottingham University, UK. Prior to joining INSEAD, she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow of Organisational Behaviour at the Harvard Business School. Having lived and worked on three continents, she is now settled in France with her husband and two children.

Speaker

Deepa Prahalad
CEO Anuvaa LLC and author

Deepa Prahalad is an author, business strategist and consultant specializing in opportunities at the intersection of consumer experience, technology and strategy. Passionate about emerging markets and innovation, she began her career searching how to improve efficiency in UN procurement and later moved to Singapore to become a commodities trader with Cargill. Deepa has worked as a management consultant with firms from start-ups to large multinationals. In 2008, she researched and co-authored the book, “Predictable Magic: Unleash The Power of Design Strategy To Transform Your Business” (Wharton School Publishing). Deepa speaks at business schools such as USC and Harvard on design strategy using the EMPOWER framework she developed and conducts workshops for executives. A frequent blogger on the Huffington Post and Harvard Business Review, she has also written about the business case for design in Bloomberg Businessweek and other magazines.

She currently serves on the Advisory Boards of Lappeeranta University of Technology (Finland) and the Challenge: Future global youth think tank and student competition. Deepa also works with several initiatives that support the work of her late father, CK Prahalad, such as the Prahalad Center for Emerging India in Chennai and the Prahalad Initiative at the University of Michigan. Deepa is a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and is on twitter at @deepaprahalad.

Speaker

Rafael Ramirez
Professor of Practice at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Rafael is the first Professor of Practice at the University of Oxford. He directs the award-winning Oxford Scenarios Programme, is Academic Director of the Oxford Networked Strategy Lab, and is one of the world’s leading experts on scenario planning. As a researcher and advisor, Rafael has worked extensively with NGOs, corporations, inter-governmental organisations, governments and think tanks. He has authored several books and many scholarly papers, and sits on the editorial boards of three scenario planning journals.

Rafael holds a PhD from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and master’s degrees from York University in Toronto and Oxford.

Prior to coming to Oxford, Rafael was part of Shell’s scenarios team and Professor of Management in HEC in Paris. He is fluent in French, Spanish, and English and he has worked on all continents.

Expertise: Scenario planning, Interactive and networked strategy, Aesthetics and business

Chair

Christian Rangen
Founder, Engage // Innovate & Strategy Tools – the Modern Strategist’s Platform

Christian Rangen is a strategy & transformation advisor to companies, innovation clusters and governments around the world. He is a transformation advisor to companies and works closely with governments to accelerate national transformation.
Over the past four years, a large part of his work has gone into exploring, researching and building Innovation Superclusters. This work has taken him to Asian Governments, European ecosystems and Norwegian growth industries post-oil & gas. He is currently involved with Innovation Supercluster projects in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Christian Rangen is founder of Engage // Innovate – a global strategy & innovation consulting company and Strategy Tools – the modern strategist’s platform.
He is the inventor of over 50 visual strategy tools in use with 1000’s of companies around the world. Built around his research since 2010, Strategy Tools is a global open-source strategy platform, with more than 50 visual strategy tools, spanning strategy, innovation entrepreneurship, business model portfolios and Superclusters. Working with a global team of strategy leaders and software developers, Strategy Tools is quickly turning into a go-to-hub for strategist’s worldwide. Recently, the team launched three strategy simulations, currently being deployed with leading companies and business schools around the world.
 
He is also faculty at BI – Norwegian Business School, where he has been teaching strategy, entrepreneurship and numerous executive education programs.
His recent publications include the Shifting Energy Arena (2018) and Building Switzerland’s Innovation Superclusters.  

He is author of INNOVATION SUPERCLUSTERS - A New Playbook for Economic Growth (forthcoming)
Christian resides in Norway with his family and two young children.

Speaker

Martin Reeves
Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute

Martin Reeves leads the BCG Henderson Institute worldwide, BCG’s think tank on new approaches to strategy and management. Martin is also a member of the BCG Henderson Institute's Innovation Sounding Board, which is dedicated to supporting, inspiring, and guiding upstream innovation at BCG.

Martin is a regular contributor to HBR, MIT SMR, Fortune and other management journals on business strategy and management.

A regular public speaker and a repeat TED@BCG presenter, Martin is also coauthor of Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, which proposes the “strategy palette” as a tool to enable business leaders to tune their approach to strategy to the strategic environment of each business.

Since joining BCG in 1989, Martin has led a broad range of strategy assignments in the Financial Institutions, Consumer Goods, Industrial Goods and Health Care sectors. He has particular expertise in the areas of adaptive strategy, strategy for multi-business systems, sustainability strategies, ecosystem strategies, collective learning and innovation, corporate vitality, and trust.

Prior to joining BCG, Martin worked for Zeneca in Japan and the United Kingdom, where he focused on marketing and strategic planning.

To see the BCG Henderson Institute’s latest research, please visit bcghendersoninstitute.com and follow on Twitter at @BCGHenderson and at @MartinKReeves.

Speaker

Helmut Reisinger
CEO Orange Business Services

Dr. Helmut Reisinger was appointed CEO of Orange Business Services in May 2018 and serves on the Executive Committee for the Orange Group. Helmut is responsible for the company strategy to support the digital transformation of our enterprise customers across France and international markets. His particular focus will be on the key business growth areas that enable multinational enterprises to leverage their entire data value chain, resulting in new business models and further success.

Helmut has over 20 years of experience in enterprise markets and solutions. Prior to his appointment as CEO, he was executive vice president, International, in charge of business activities outside the home market France, including Europe, the Americas, APAC, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and Indirect business. He joined Orange in July 2007 as senior vice president, Europe.

Before joining Orange Business Services, Helmut was vice president Western Europe at Avaya Inc. Previously, Helmut was CEO of private equity owned NextiraOne Germany and a member of their European Executive Committee. Helmut also held several leadership positions during his nine-year tenure with Alcatel Austria, with his last position being managing director of Alcatel’s enterprise activities in Austria.

A native of Austria, Helmut is a graduate of Vienna University for Economics and Business, CEMS Masters Program at WU Wien with international studies at Hochschule St Gallen (Switzerland) and ESCCA Angers (France).

Helmut speaks English, French, German and Spanish.

Chair

Megan Reitz
Professor of Leadership and Dialogue, Ashdrige Executive Education
Hult Ashridge Business School

I am a facilitator, teacher, speaker, executive coach, researcher and author dedicated to exploring and finding ways to improve the way we interact with one another in the workplace.

My passion and curiosity centres around the quality of how we meet, see, hear, speak, learn with and encounter one another in organisational systems and how we might encourage dialogue which is more humane and which enables us, our colleagues and our society to flourish.

Working at the intersection of leadership, change, dialogue and mindfulness, I have presented my research to audiences throughout the world and I am listed on the Thinkers50 Radar of global management thinkers and on the 2018 HR Most Influential list of Thinkers.

My recent research with John Higgins on ‘Speaking truth to Power’ – examining how perceptions of power enable and silence others – has been featured in three articles in Harvard Business Review. It is the subject of my TEDx talk and our new book, Speak Up: Say what needs to be said and hear what needs to be heard, with Financial Times Publishing.

With Michael Chaskalson I have been examining mindful leadership and our research has been published by Harvard Business Review (Nov and Dec 2016), featured in Forbes Magazine and our book, Mind Time: How Ten Mindful Minutes can enhance your work, health and happiness, (Harper Thorsons, 2018). I am also the author of Dialogue in Organizations; Developing Relational Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

As well as running my own business, I am Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School, Ashridge Executive Education. I supervise students undertaking their PhD on the Executive Doctorate in Organisational Change and I also teach on a wide range of open and custom programmes. My particular interest is in action inquiry based research – research which is participatory and dedicated to initiating generative change through cycles of action, inquiry and reflection – however, my own research includes a broad range of methodological approaches.

Before joining Ashridge, I was a consultant with Deloitte; surfed the dot-com boom with boo.com; and worked in strategy consulting for The Kalchas Group, now the strategic arm of Computer Science Corporation.

I was educated at Cambridge University gaining an MA in Land Economy. I received a Masters in Change Agent Skills and Strategies at Surrey University and a Masters in Research at Cranfield School of Management where I was also awarded my PhD.

I am an accredited executive coach with Ashridge and The School of Coaching and I am qualified with the British Psychological Society. As a mindfulness teacher, I am currently studying with the Mindfulness Network and I am an Associate at Mindfulness Works.

I am mother to two wonderful daughters who test me regularly on my powers of mindfulness and dialogue. My favourite pastimes are to hike in beautiful countryside with my family and to cycle through the forest at Ashridge. 

Chair

Daniel Rettig
Editor-in-Chief ada, Handelsblatt Group

Daniel Rettig, 38, is Chief Editor of ada, the digital education platform of the Handelsblatt Media Group. Prior to that, he was the head of department in the Management & Success department of the WirtschaftsWoche. He has also written several books, including "Ich denke, also spinn ich" (2011), "Die guten alten Zeiten" (2013) and "Warum Perfektion sinnlos ist" (2019) and moderated several events.

Speaker

Verena Ringler
Curator, Erste Foundation

Verena Ringler is curator of the ERSTE Foundation Tipping Point Talks in Vienna, a top-flight series with Francis Fukuyama, Marietje Schaake, Felwine Sarr and Timothy Snyder throughout 2019. The aim is to draw renewed inspiration from the founding of the first savings bank in Vienna in 1819. This had proven a daring, empowering and long-term social business concept in an era of profound transformation. Today, how can new alliances of responsibility foster societal, civic and economic prosperity in the Central and Eastern European region?

Verena realizes her vision with ERSTE Foundation in her role as founder and director European Commons (www.europeancommons.eu), a network that initiates and realizes informal dialogue formats and backchannel conversations among leaders in European politics, business, and society. She developed her unique user-centered and multi-disciplinary approach to leadership and public service in magazine journalism, diplomacy, as well as philanthropy: as staff editor with Foreign Policy in Washington D.C., and as communications advisor with a transatlantic diplomatic team in Pristina, Kosovo. For more than five years until 2018, she devised and oversaw the Europe portfolio of a large German foundation (Stiftung Mercator).

Verena believes in the necessity to explore the human dimension of contemporary political and international public sector challenges further. This in turn demands an integrated, systems approach— from an institutional inventory at communal level all the way to the strategic conversation about the EU’s future.

Verena got her MA from the Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies in 2002. She also studied in Uppsala, Vienna, and her hometown, Innsbruck. A recent essay on global leadership appeared in Realistic Hope (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and she co-authored the European Reformists‘ Report Refocus the EU: Planet, Lifetime, Technology (Carnegie Europe, 2019). She serves in several advisory boards, including with the European Policy Centre in Brussels.

In June/July 2019, Verena’s pledge for the inception of an EU Citizen Commissioner gained cross-border attention. She was publicly nominated as independent candidate by the Austrian liberal party NEOS to become that country’s EU Commissioner in Brussels. Ultimately, Austria’s parliament and caretaker government sent the incumbent for a third stint.

Chair

Marie Ringler
Ashoka Europe Leader

Marie Ringler is leading Ashoka's work in Europe. She founded Ashoka's Austrian office in 2011 and soon took over Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe. In 2015 she became one of Ashoka's Europe Directors, in 2018 she was appointed European Leader of Ashoka. She was born in Vienna, studied Sociology, Political Science and Women`s Studies at the University of Vienna, and holds a degree from ESADE Business School, Spain and an MBA from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
 
In the late 90`s she helped build Public Netbase, an art institution dedicated to exploring the social implications of the internet and new technologies through the lens of art, and later became its managing director. She was elected into office as a Member of the Regional Parliament and City Council of Vienna in 2001, making her the youngest member.  During her time in office, she focused on developing policy to drive innovations in society, and served on the Vienna Department of Commerce Advisory Board, initiated the city’s Open Source Software Strategy and developed a federal policy program for Innovation.
After two successful terms in office, she decided against a life-long career in politics and established Ashoka`s Austrian office in Vienna.
 
In her role as Director of Ashoka in Central and Eastern Europe she led Ashoka’s relaunch efforts in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Israel. As Europe Leader Ringler is advancing Ashoka’s work in over 26 country offices who support more than 570 Social Entrepreneurs (“Ashoka Fellows”). Ringler serves as a 2nd Opinion Interviewer in Ashoka’s Global Fellow Selection process and has led the global selection process for more than 50 Fellows in countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, Colombia, and the US.  Her work has been featured extensively in international media and she is a frequent speaker at conferences and events focusing on social entrepreneurship, social innovation, cross-sectoral collaboration and policy.
She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Austrian Broadcasting Agency (ORF), and serves on several award juries.
 
Ashoka is the world`s largest network of 3.600 Social Entrepreneurs, spanning across more than 90 countries, who are solving some of the world`s toughest social problems. Ashoka works to identify, elect and support leading social entrepreneurs financially and professionally. We bring communities of social entrepreneurs together to help leverage their impact, scale their ideas, and disseminate their practices. And we help to build the infrastructure, financial systems and mindsets needed to facilitate the global growth of social innovation and an Everyone a Changemaker world.

Chair

Johan Roos
Chief Academic Officer, Hult International Business School

I serve as Chief Academic Officer of HULT International Business School with campuses in London, Boston, San Francisco, Dubai and Shanghai (hult.edu). Driving quality and innovation in the dynamic HULT organization and its global higher education ecosystem is a passion. Before joining HULT in 2016, I served as leader and/or faculty member in several European business schools and a research foundation. Another passion is advancing the concept and practice of LEGO Serious Play, which I co-invented two decades ago. 

CV and publications at johanroos.se.

Speaker

Gisbert Rühl
CEO, Klöckner & Co SE

With a number of leadership positions in industry and consulting already under his belt, Gisbert Rühl joined the Klöckner & Co Management Board as CFO in 2005. He has served as Chairman of the Board since 2009. Gisbert is currently driving forward Klöckner & Co’s digital transformation and the development of an open industry platform in which the company plays a pioneering role within the steel industry.

Speaker

Christian Sarkar
Founder of Ecosystematic and Double Loop Marketing LLC

Christian is the founder of Ecosystematic and Double Loop Marketing LLC, a marketing consultancy.  As the co-founder (with Philip Kotler) and editor of The Marketing Journal, he continuously scours the world of marketing for new insights and next practices. He is involved in numerous non-profit and public-education projects, including FIXCapitalism.com and the $300 House Project.

Christian Sarkar is an author, entrepreneur, and marketing consultant. He’s the co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action, a book written with Philip Kotler, the “father of modern marketing.”

Christian is a leading authority in several areas:

• Ecosystem Strategy: strategic insights and recommendations to help businesses and institutions tap into the power of ecosystematic growth
• Double Loop Marketing™: development and implementation of ecosystem-based engagement platforms
• Brand Activism: a growing trend that aligns businesses with the greater good
• Thought-Leadership Diffusion: creating and spreading leading ideas in business and academia
• Idea-Engineering: developing creative capabilities for the organization of the future

Christian has deep expertise with strategic marketing and branding and has worked closely with several leading businesses and individuals, including:

• Business: Deloitte Center for the Edge, Strategyn, Physician Leadership Institute, Center for Transformation and Innovation, Knowledge Kinetics, Penguin Books USA, Oracle, BMC Software, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat Linux
• Thought-Leaders: Philip Kotler, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Stuart Hart, Anthony Ulwick, Tom Davenport, Marshall Goldsmith, Laurence Haughton, Larry Prusak, Vijay Govindarajan
• Academia: Emory University, Thunderbird, Babson, UCLA, Dartmouth, Michigan, University of Houston, Harvard University, University of Vermont, Northwestern University
• Start-Ups: Neural ID, Mezeo, Danube, Enterprise Informatics, Compliance Spectrum, Alertlogic, JME Software, Scalable Software, Neon Enterprise Software
• Entertainment: Steel Pulse
• Self-Help: The Work of Byron Katie
• Non-Profit: Enterprise for a Sustainable World, Solar Electric Light Fund, International Fund for Africa, Partners In Health, Hold On [4 Haiti]

Speaker

Lucia Seel
General Manager/Owner, Lucia Seel International Consulting GmbH Communication and Content Manager, European Cluster Collaboration Platform

Lucia Seel is General Manager/Owner of Lucia Seel International Consulting GmbH. She is currently  the Communication and Content Manager of the European Cluster Collaboration Platform set up by the European Commission in 2016. Based on her vast experience of over 25 years in international affairs, projects, communication and European programmes and following 6 years of coordination of European programmes at Clusterland Upper Austria GmbH (where she played an active role in several flagship European projects like the European Cluster Excellence Initiative, The European Cluster Observatory, TACTICS), Lucia set up in 2011 her own company focusing on development and management of EU projects, support for international cooperation in the field of innovation and clustering, training and international networking and communication.

Lucia was between 2012-2013 member of the high-level expert group “European Forum for Clusters in Emerging Industries” set up by the European Commission, DG Enterprise & Industry and was appointed in September 2019 member of the new European Commission’s (DG GROW) Cluster Expert Group providing recommendations, advice, and expertise to the Commission on how to better use clusters as a strategic tool of industrial policy, interregional collaboration and for integrating SMEs into EU and global value chains. Between 2016-2017 she was Community Manager of the Interreg Europe Policy Learning Platforms (Research & Innovation and SME competitiveness). She is well-known speaker and moderator at international conferences and workshops, with a large record of presentations and moderations. She is also evaluator in the COSME programme, a certified Cluster Benchmarking Expert and Gold Label Assessor for the European Secretariat of Cluster Analysis.

Lucia graduated magna cum laude from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. She worked both for multinational companies such as Saatchi & Saatchi Centrade in Bucharest and Silhouette International in Linz/AT (as area manager for South-East Asia and South Europe), and for small companies in Austria and public administration bodies in Austria and Romania. Lucia is Austrian, but Romanian born and speaks six languages.

As an active international person, Lucia was one of the founders and the first president of AIESEC in Romania. She is a member for 18 years of the EWMD (European Women Management Development Network) and of the TCI (The Competitiveness Institute) – the global practitioners’ network for competitiveness, clusters and innovation.

Speaker

Raj Sisodia
FW Olin Distinguished Professor of Global Business, Babson College;
Co-founder & Co-Chairman, Conscious Capitalism Inc.

Raj Sisodia is FW Olin Distinguished Professor of Global Business and Whole Foods Market Research Scholar in Conscious Capitalism at Babson College, and Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Conscious Capitalism Inc. He has a Ph. D. in Marketing from Columbia University. Raj is co-author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (2013) and Wall Street Journal bestseller Everybody Matters (2015). He was named one of “Ten Outstanding Trailblazers of 2010” by Good Business International, and one of the “Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior” by Trust Across America for 2010 and 2011. Raj received an honorary doctorate from Johnson & Wales University in 2016.

Raj has published eleven books and over 100 academic articles. His book Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose was named a top business book of 2007 by Amazon.com. He has consulted with numerous companies, including AT&T, Nokia, LG, DPDHL, POSCO, Kraft Foods, Whole Foods Market, Tata, Siemens, Sprint, Volvo, IBM, Walmart, Rabobank, McDonalds and Southern California Edison. He is on the Board of Directors at The Container Store and a trustee of Conscious Capitalism Inc. www.RajSisodia.com

Speaker

Young K. Sohn
Corporate President & CSO for Samsung Electronics and Chairman of the Board, Harman

Young Sohn is president and chief strategy officer for Samsung Electronics, and Chairman of the Board, Harman International. He leads development and strategy for global innovation, investment and new business creation. Young led the $8 billion acquisition of Harman International Industries.

Prior to joining Samsung Electronics, Young served as CEO of Oak Technologies, Agilent Semiconductor (now Avago) and Inphi Corporation. Under his leadership as CEO and board member, he took PLX Technologies, Synnex Technologies and Inphi public. He also has served on the Boards of ARM, Synnex Corporation and Cymer, Inc.

He serves on the MIT Sloan School North America Board, is a senior advisor to the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, is a member of the board of directors at Cadence, and is an advisor for the University of California Innovation Council.  Young also was a senior advisor for the MIT Media Lab’s One Laptop per Child.

Young holds a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and MS from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Speaker

Sandy Stelling
Managing Director, Business Transformation, Alaska Airlines

Sandy Stelling is managing director of business transformation at Alaska Airlines. A Pacific Northwest aviation leader, she uses her experience in commercial and airline operations, technology and culture to develop guest experience and operations strategies. Sandy is a catalyst for change and she builds teams to drive execution and deliver results for guests, employees and the airline.

Sandy joined Alaska in 1999 as a project manager and in her 19 years has held various leadership positions in Technology, Airport Operations & Customer Service, Maintenance & Engineering and Marketing. Most recently Sandy led the Alaska/Virgin America integration program which delivered a single customer experience across Alaska’s website, mobile apps, kiosks, airports and call centers. She has just started up Alaska’s Business Transformation team, responsible to orchestrate and deliver the highest impact, most complex programs across the enterprise.

She is a graduate of Lehigh University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering. Sandy volunteers with Lehigh University’s Alumni Admissions Office, the Lehigh Silicon Valley program and its Professional Women’s Alliance. Sandy is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for the Woodland Park Zoo where she also serves as chair of the Governance committee. In addition, Sandy serves on the Education Committee for the Boeing Academy of STEM learning at the Museum of Flight . Sandy and her husband, Cliff, have 2 daughters, and 2 grandchildren. Sandy and Cliff live in West Seattle.

Speaker

Richard Straub
Founder and President, Global Peter Drucker Forum

Richard Straub has drawn his ample experience of leadership and management from a 32-year career at IBM during which, among other things, he was instrumental in developing IBM’s PC business in Austria and Europe. Over the past decade, he and his wife Ilse have built up the Peter Drucker Forum. Its aim is the continuous improvement of the practice of management in business and in society. Today, the Drucker Forum is recognized globally as a leading management conference. This is reflected in strategic partnerships with the likes of the Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times and the City of Vienna. In recognition of the impact and reputation of the Drucker Forum, Richard Straub was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honor for the Republic of Austria in early 2019.

Speaker

Howard Sublett
CEO / Chief Product Owner, Scrum Alliance

Howard Sublett is the chief product owner at Scrum Alliance, a new position for him and for the organization as they continue to evolve toward sustainable agility. Howard brings a wealth of experience in a variety of agile practices to this role, including serving as an agile coach and leader at several agile consultancies. As chief product owner, his primary responsibilities are to forge coalitions, to decide which products and services best deliver value to and serve customers, and to promote agile and Scrum principles and values in the greater community. He shares the C-suite with Chief ScrumMaster Melissa Boggs.

Before joining Scrum Alliance in 2018, Howard championed the SolutionsIQ culture as director of community development. As the face of SolutionsIQ, Howard could regularly be found building relationships at industry events and hosting the popular Agile Amped podcast series. Internally, Howard advocated for the individual and nurtured the company’s teams. Howard is focused on people, who they are and what they need, and lives according to the mantra that strangers are only friends he hasn’t met. He is passionate about making workplaces joyful, sustainable, and prosperous with agile principles, practices, and values—and about sharing this message with the world.

Speaker

Yoshikuni Takashige
Chief Strategist, Global Marketing, Fujitsu Limited

Yoshikuni Takashige joined Fujitsu in 1984. He was engaged in international business, taking strong leadership in developing Fujitsu’s important strategic partnerships and joint ventures with global companies. Throughout his career, he has been exposed to many different people, businesses and cultures around the world, which has helped him shape his thought about transformation of business and society. Since 2012, Yoshikuni has been leading the creation of the Fujitsu Technology and Service Vision, which sets out Fujitsu’s human-centric vision and its thinking on how organizations can innovate by leveraging digital technology. It was first launched in 2013, and has been updated annually. He speaks about innovation and digital transformation internationally.

He received an MBA degree from the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Tokyo.

Speaker

Tony Tan Keng Yam
Former President of the Republic of Singapore
Special Advisor, GIC Honorary Patron and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Singapore Management University

Dr Tony Tan Keng Yam graduated from the University of Singapore with a First Class Honours Degree in Physics in 1962.  He has a Master of Science degree from MIT and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Adelaide.

Dr Tan has served as the Minister for Finance, Trade and Industry, Education and Deputy Prime Minister and Co-ordinating Minister for Security and Defence. Dr Tan was the Chairman and CEO of OCBC Bank from 1992 to 1995.

In September 2005, after leaving the Cabinet, Dr Tan was appointed Deputy Chairman and Executive Director of GIC, Chairman of the National Research Foundation and Chairman of SPH. In July 2011, Dr Tan contested in the Presidential Election and was sworn in as the seventh President of the Republic of Singapore on 1 September 2011 for a 6-year term. In September 2017, Dr Tan was appointed the Honorary Patron and Distinguished Senior Fellow of Singapore Management University. In January 2018, Dr Tan was appointed the Special Advisor to GIC.

Speaker

Karenann Terrell
Chief Digital & Technology Officer, GSK

Karenann joined GSK as Chief Digital & Technology Officer in September 2017 with a company-wide remit to transform how new technologies are used to improve performance across the Group. She is a member of the Corporate Executive Team.

She is responsible for GSK’s digital, data and analytics strategy. She works with a wide range of partners from inside and outside the healthcare sector to bring new technologies to GSK, enhancing areas such as clinical trials and drug development; improving how we interact with healthcare professionals, customers and consumers; and making internal processes more efficient.

Karenann’s previous role was Chief Information Officer for Walmart, where she led a multi-year effort to transform Walmart in the use of data, analytics and digital engagement with its customers. Prior to Walmart she was at Baxter International, where she was Chief Information Officer, and before that Daimler Chrysler Corporation. Karenann began her career in General Motors and held various roles in manufacturing, engineering and brand management.

Karenann is a member of the board of trustees for the New York Hall of Science and in 2017 she became a Non-Executive Director of Pluralsight LLC.

She earned graduate and post-graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering from Kettering University and Purdue University, respectively.

Chair

Nicole Torres
Senior Associate Editor, Harvard Business Review

Nicole Torres is a senior associate editor at Harvard Business Review, where she co-hosts the Women at Work podcast and covers new research related to gender, international business, and health care. She has spoken at conferences such as SXSW, AOM, and Werk It; and she has written for The Boston Globe, Salon, and other publications.

Speaker

Ricardo Vargas
Executive Director Brightline Initiative

Ricardo Viana Vargas is a specialist in project management and strategy implementation. Over the past 20 years, he has been responsible for more than 80 major transformation projects in several countries, covering an investment portfolio of over 20 billion USD.

He is currently the Executive Director of the Brightline Initiative™, a coalition of leading global organizations from business, government and not for profit sectors, dedicated to provide a knowledge and networking platform that delivers insights and solutions to successfully bridge the gap between strategy development and strategy implementation.

From 2012 to 2016, Ricardo Global Director of the Infrastructure and Project Management Group with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS).

Vargas has written fifteen books on the subject of project management, and also host one of the most relevant podcasts in the field, the 5 Minutes PM Podcast, with more than 4 millions views.

See full Biography here

Speaker

Julia Wang
CEO, MLA Foundation
President, Peter F. Drucker Academy (Hong Kong)

Dr. Wang is an expert in financial management, strategic planning and corporate governance. She has held senior leadership positions in multi-business company, education group and management institutes. She is now the CEO of MLA Foundation (MLA stands for Management as a Liberal Art) and the President of Peter F. Drucker Academy (Hong Kong). She also serves as an Independent Non- Executive Director of one large Chinese state-owned financial group.

She was the Deputy General Manager of Finance, China Resources (Holdings) Co. (CRC). During her service in CRC, she successfully developed the “CRC 6S” strategic management system to support the company’s transformation. “CRC 6S” is regarded as one of the best management practices in Asian companies, that strives for excellence through integration of business strategy, total budgeting, cash flow management, corporate performance measurement, internal audit, and manager’s evaluation.

With effective leadership and professional experience in both strategic management and corporate governance, Dr. WANG shifted her focus on management education and consulting after she left CRC. In her current position as president of The Peter F. Drucker Academy (Hong Kong), she is very passionate in promoting the Practice of Management as a Liberal Art in the Greater China Region.

Speaker

Amy Webb
Founder, Future Today Institute

Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist. She is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business and the Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures. Founded in 2006, the Institute advises Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, government agencies, large nonprofits, universities and startups around the world. Amy was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led and was won the prestigious 2017 Thinkers50 RADAR Award. Amy’s special area of research is artificial intelligence, and she has advised three-star generals and admirals, White House leadership and CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies.

Amy is the author of three books, including The Big Nine: How The Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity (PublicAffairs/ Hachette, March 5, 2019), which is a call-to-arms about the broken nature of artificial intelligence, and the powerful corporations that are turning the human-machine relationship on its head. Her last book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream (PublicAffairs/ Hachette, December 2016), explains Amy’s forecasting methodology and how any organization can identify risk and opportunity before disruption hits. Signals is a Washington Post bestseller, was selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016, won a 2017 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology and was one of Amazon’s best books 2016. Signals has been released in multiple international editions and has been translated into a number of languages. Her bestselling memoir Data, A Love Story (Dutton/ Penguin 2013) is about finding love via algorithms. Her TED talk about Data has been viewed more than 6 million times and has been translated into 32 languages. Data is being adapted as a feature film, which is currently in production.

Amy is a Fellow in the United States-Japan Leadership Program and a Foresight Fellow in the U.S. Government Accountability Office Center for Strategic Foresight. She was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and her research received a national Sigma Delta Chi award. Amy was also a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology, media and international diplomacy. 

Amy writes extensively about artificial intelligence, emerging technology, digital media and the impacts/ opportunities they present. She is the tech columnist and a contributing editor at Inc. Magazine, and she writes a column about the future of technology for The Nikkei (Japan). She regularly contributes to a number of publications all over the world, which include the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fortune, Mother Jones and others. Amy’s future forecasting work has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, CNN, NPR, and more. Her research has also been cited in several academic papers.

For the past 15 years, Amy has been dedicated to helping inform and shape the future of journalism. She is a member of the accreditation council of the ACEJMC, where she is helping to recalibrate accreditation standards for journalism and communication programs throughout the country. She is chairing a committee to develop a new, international digital certification program. Every year, Amy lectures about the future of media and technology at Harvard University as well as a number of universities worldwide, which have included Institut d'études politiques de Paris, Tokyo University and National University of Kyiv. She was a David Letterman Distinguished Professional Lecturer at Ball State University in 2016.

Amy serves on a script consultant for films and shows about artificial intelligence, technology and the future. Most recently, she worked on The First, a sci-fi drama about the first humans to travel to Mars (airing on Hulu and Channel 4). She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and has served as a Blue Ribbon Emmy award judge. 

Amy originally attended the Jacobs School of Music to study classical clarinet and served on the Board of Directors for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. She holds a B.A. in political science, game theory and economics from Indiana University and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She also earned Nikyu Certification in the Japanese government-administered Language Proficiency Test. In addition, she earned the rank of Shodan (first-degree black belt) in Aikido, but a serious accident during training a few years ago forced her to retire. She lives in Baltimore and in New York City.

Speaker

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Author, Harvard Business Review Press

Based in New York, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is an author, speaker, and lecturer on the topics of innovation and problem solving.
 
His first book, "Innovation as usual", was published by Harvard Business Review Press and came out in five languages including Chinese. The book shares how leaders can help their people be more innovative as an integrated part of their regular work.
 
His second book (forthcoming) shares how a method called reframing can help you find new solutions to your toughest problems. The method was described in his recent HBR article "Are you solving the right problems", and Thomas’s workshop on the topic has been used by companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, UBS, Citigroup, Time Warner Group, Wall Street Journal and the United Nations.
Prior to his business career, Wedell-Wedellsborg served for four years as an officer and infantry platoon commander with the Danish Royal Guards. Originally from Denmark, he holds an MA in Media Science from the University of Copenhagen and an MBA from IESE Business School.

Speaker

Bart Weetjens
Social entrepreneur; Zen priest

Bart is a Zen priest and celebrated social entrepreneur. In 1995 he founded the organisation APOPO, which saves human lives from disaster and disease by training HeroRATs. Based on the shared vision that inner wellbeing is a prerequisite to do sustainably well in society, he joined The Wellbeing Project in 2015, to shift the culture in the field of social change to a more caring and compassionate one.  In 2017 he co-founded lagrandeterre.org, a permaculture/wellbeing center in the French Ardennes. Bart has been elected an ASHOKA fellow and a SCHWAB fellow to the World Economic Forum. He won the Skoll Award for social Entrepreneurship in 2009.  Bart holds a Masters in Product Design from Antwerp University, Belgium.

Chair

Ania G. Wieckowski
Executive Editor, Harvard Business Review

Ania G. Wieckowski is an Executive Editor at Harvard Business Review, where she focuses on organizational behavior, people management, and psychology. In previous roles, including Managing Editor of HBR Press, she led efforts around HBR’s content curation and digital transformation. She is an avid hiker and choral singer.

Speaker

Peter Williamson
Professor of International Management, University of Cambridge, Judge Business School; Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge

Professor Peter Williamson is Professor of International Management at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School and Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge. He has held professorships at London Business School, Harvard Business School and INSEAD (in Fontainebleau and Singapore). Formerly with Merrill Lynch and The Boston Consulting Group, he earned his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. He has served as non-executive director and chairman of companies spanning renewable energy, textiles, hedge funds, whisky (Glenmorangie), and software.

Peter has been visiting China regularly since 1983, assisting numerous multinationals and Chinese joint ventures as well as advising foreign companies on several acquisitions in China. More recently he has been assisting Chinese companies venturing abroad to develop their international strategies and organisations and to integrate foreign acquisitions. Peter has also assisted a number of major companies, including Alibaba Group, in building powerful business ecosystems to enhance and magnify their competitive advantage. He
has travelled extensively in many of China’s provinces and regions for both business and leisure.

His books include: The Competitive Advantage of Emerging Market Multinationals; Dragons at Your Door; Winning in Asia; and From Global to Metanational. His new book, Ecosystem Edge: Sustaining Competitiveness In the Face of Disruption, will be published in 2019.

Recent articles include: “The New Mission for Multinationals”, “Accelerated Innovation”, “Strategies for Competing in a Changed China” and “Is Your Innovation Process Global?” (all in the MIT-Sloan Management Review) -- The latter received a Sloan-Pricewaterhouse Coopers Award honouring those articles that have contributed most to the enhancement of management practice; “How China Re-Set Its Global Acquisition Agenda”, “China’s Hidden Dragons” (all in Harvard Business Review). His more than 50 other articles
include: “Ecosystem Advantage: How to successfully harness the power of partners”, and “Diversification, Core Competences and Corporate Performance”.

Speaker

Ralf Wintergerst
Chairman of the Management Board, Group CEO of Giesecke+Devrient

Ralf Wintergerst is Chairman of the Management Board of Giesecke+Devrient (G+D). In addition to his duties as CEO, he is responsible for the Central Services departments of Information Systems, Corporate Security, Compliance Management and Auditing, Corporate Communications, Corporate Strategy, Corporate Development, Mergers & Acquisitions, Legal Services and Corporate Governance.

Wintergerst joined G+D in 1998 as Director of International Subsidiaries in the Cards and Services business. Between 1999 and 2005 he held various management positions in the division Currency Management Solutions, ultimately heading it from 2006 on.

As Group Executive of the business unit Banknote Wintergerst has been a member of the Giesecke+Devrient Management Board since 2013. In November 2016 he was appointed Chairman of the Management Board.

Furthermore to his role at G+D, Wintergerst is Chairman of the Supervisory Board of secunet Security Networks AG. In addition, he holds various positions related to IT security issues, including member of the advisory board of the Cyber Defense research institute of the Bundeswehr University in Munich and co-chair of the Digital Summit Platform "Security, Protection and Trust" of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Since mid-2019, he took over as chair of the North Africa Middle East Initiative of German Business (NMI) and has also become a member of the Executive Committee of Germany's digital association, Bitkom.

Ralf Wintergerst studied Business Administration and holds a Master´s Degree in Management as well as in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Speaker

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox
CEO of 20-first and author

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, a leading international gender-balance consultancy. 20-first works with top management at some of the world’s best-known companies to identify the business opportunities of gender balance and how to achieve them. She has written a number of best-sellers in the field, including One Key to Gender Balance, Four Phases to Women’s Careers, Seven Steps to Leading Gender-Balanced Businesses, How Women Mean Business, and Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of Our Next Economic Revolution, which won the Manpower Business Book of the Year award. Her most recent book is a more personal take on the consequences of gender balance at home: Late Love: Mating in Maturity.

Avivah speaks on leadership, marketing and talent management, and dual career issues across the globe, writes for FORBES and Harvard Business Review and lectures at HEC Business School. She is Founder and Honorary President of GlobalPWN.net, an international professional women’s network. Canadian, French and Swiss, she has been recognized by ELLE Magazine as one of the TOP 40 Women Leading Change. She lives in London with her sculptor husband and is occasionally visited by her two, globe-trotting, gender-balanced children, a son and daughter.

Speaker

Yong Wu
Vice President, Haier Smart Home ECO-Platform, General Manager Kitchen Appliances and SDA PL., Haier Group

现任海尔集团海尔智家生态平台副总裁、厨房电器产业总经理、生活电器产业总经理。

Mr. Wu, the Vice President of Haier Smart Home ECO-Platform, the General Manager of Kitchen Appliances and SDA PL.

2001年7月加入海尔集团，进入集团以来先后从事冰箱生产制造、海外营销、制冷产业中国区总经理等相关工作。

Joined Haier Group in July 2001, Mr. Wu has successively worked on refrigerator production and manufacturing, overseas marketing, and worked as the general manager of refrigeration PL in China market.

Speaker

Arthur Yeung
Senior Advisor, Tencent Holdings Limited

Arthur is a hybrid professor, intertwining his career between academic and corporate worlds. As a professor, he had taught at the University of Michigan and China Europe International Business School. As a corporate executive, he served as Chief Learning Officer and subsequently Chief HR Officer of Acer Group from 1998 to 2002. Reporting directly to the Chairman & CEO, he worked closely with the top management team to radically transform Acer to meet the challenges and opportunities of new business realities. Since 2008, he takes on the role as Senior Management Advisor of Tencent Holdings and sits on the Executive Leadership Committee. In this capacity, he supports and facilitates organizational innovation and leadership development within Tencent and its key strategic partners such as JD.com, DiDi, Meituan Dianping, and 58.com.

At CEIBS, his outstanding teaching has been repeatedly recognized through numerous awards like “Outstanding Teaching Award”, “Most Favorite EMBA Professor Award”, and the most prestigious “CEIBS Medal for Teaching Excellence”. He founded the Center of Organizational and People Excellence (COPE). To help enterprenuers and CEOs systematically build organizational capability based on his proprietry diagnostic framework, he is also founder and president of Y-Triangle Organizational Learning Oasis with 100+ members in the last seven years.

Author of a dozen of books and numerous articles, Dr. Yeung research interests focus on building organizational capability for strategic implementation, globalization of Chinese firms, growing talent for business growth, and leading large-scale organizational transformation. He had received research awards from two leading human resource associations in the United States: Yoder-Heneman Personnel Research Award presented by the Society of Human Resource Management (1989) and Best Research Paper of the Year by the Human Resource Planning Society (1995). In 2002, he also received the Gold Book Award jointly presented by Ministry of Economic Affairs and Chinese Management Association in Taiwan. Dr. Yeung also serves as Global Editor (Asia-Pacific) for Talent and Strategy Journal (USA), ex- associate editor (1995-2006) and current editorial board member of Human Resource Management Journal (USA), editorial board member of Harvard Business Review (China), Human Relations Journal (U.S.A.), and Thunderbird International Business Review (U.S.A.).

In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Yeung has also been involved in training and consulting projects for numerous major corporations in Asia and North America, including Acer, Alibaba, Applied Materials, Bank of China, China Mobile, China Steel, CNOOC, Ford Motors, Hewlett-Packard, ICI, ICBC, ING Antai, Inventec, Lenovo Group, Philips, TSMC, TCL, and United Microelectronic Group. He also serves as board director for five corporations, one not-for-profit organization, and advises CEOs of several leading Chinese firms.

Due to his contribution in executive education, Dr. Yeung was recognized in 1999 by “Business Horizon” magazine in the U.S. as one of the next-generation “Executive Development Guru.” In addition to teaching at CEIBS, he teaches regularly in executive programs in association with Harvard, INSEAD, and Michigan. He also chairs the Regional Judge Committee for selecting “Best Employers in Asia” sponsored by Hewitt.

Speaker

Michele Zanini
Managing Director, Management Lab

Michele is the Managing Director of the Management Lab (MLab), an organization that works with pioneering firms to create tomorrow’s new practices today. Prior to co-founding the Management Lab (with Professor Gary Hamel and Polly LaBarre), Michele spent a decade at McKinsey & Company leading client work and research in the strategy and organization practices. He was also a graduate fellow at the RAND Corporation, where for five years he focused on national security issues such as global terrorism and NATO strategy. Over the last few years Michele has published several Harvard Business Review articles with Professor Gary Hamel on creating organizations as capable as the people inside of them. Gary Hamel and Michele are the authors of a forthcoming book, Humanocracy (Harvard Business School Press: 2020).

Speaker

Ruimin Zhang
CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Haier Group

Zhang Ruimin, Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of Haier Group, is the creator of the Rendanheyi model and ranked by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top 50 management thinkers.

Over the past 33 years, Mr. Zhang has consistently helmed Haier with an innovative, entrepreneurial spirit and forward-looking strategies, transforming Haier from an insolvent collectively-owned factory into a world-renowned brand and multinational group of companies. In 2017, Haier achieved a global revenue of RMB 241.9 billion, ranking top among the world’s white goods brands for the ninth consecutive year.

Mr. Zhang has always believed in putting people first as a source of value. He has created Rendanheyi, a management model that draws inspiration from both traditional Chinese culture and modern business management practices. This new way of management thinking with Chinese characteristics represents a breakthrough for Chinese companies as they transform from followers into pioneers in management innovation. For his contribution to management thinking, Mr. Zhang has been ranked twice by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top 50 leadership and management thinkers.