Innovation af forretningsmodeller

Why organisations work with Henry Coutinho-Mason He brings a working method for trend-driven innovation, set out in Trend-Driven Innovation and refined across a decade as Managing Director of TrendWatching, rather than a curated list of things happening now. His second book, The Future Normal, co-written with WSJ bestseller Rohit Bhargava, gives executive audiences a structured view of the thirty shifts most likely to reshape the next decade, tailored by sector. He has delivered more than 100 keynotes and workshops across 30+ countries for Mastercard, Johnson & Johnson, Calvin Klein, Tata, Siemens, Google, HP and Marriott, so the material is already pressure-tested on senior corporate audiences. His AI sessions are built around a people-first innovation strategy, not a tools tour, which lands with leaders who need to commit capital and organisational focus rather than pilot for the sake of it. The 3Space track record, recognised by the FT/Citi Urban Ingenuity Awards and NESTA New Radicals, gives him operator credibility beyond the commentary layer. Biography highlights Co-author, The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade, with Rohit Bhargava (Ideapress). Co-author, Trend-Driven Innovation: Beat Accelerating Customer Expectations. Former Managing Director, TrendWatching. Guest lecturer, HEC Paris. Co-founder, 3Space; European winner of the FT/Citi Urban Ingenuity Awards, commended by Fast Company World Changing Ideas, selected by NESTA New Radicals. Keynote and workshop engagements with Mastercard, Johnson & Johnson, Calvin Klein, Tata, Siemens, Telefonica, HP, Google, GE, Accenture, and Marriott. Biography Most large organisations know their customer expectations are moving. What they struggle with is turning that awareness into a pipeline of decisions a board will back. That gap, between trend awareness and commercial commitment, is where Coutinho-Mason does his work. He spent roughly a decade at TrendWatching, ending as Managing Director of what became one of the most widely referenced consumer trend intelligence firms in the world. That run produced a method, published as Trend-Driven Innovation, for converting shifting customer expectations into concrete innovation bets rather than observations. His second book, The Future Normal, written with Wall Street Journal bestselling author Rohit Bhargava, maps thirty ideas and instigators shaping the next decade, from generative AI to biophilic design. Leadership teams at Mastercard, Johnson & Johnson, Calvin Klein, Tata, Siemens and others have booked versions of the material tailored to their sector, often as the opening frame for a strategy offsite. Alongside the speaking and advisory work, he co-founded 3Space, a social enterprise that turns empty commercial property into space for charities and community groups. It won the European section of the FT/Citi Urban Ingenuity Awards and was commended by Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, a proof point that the innovation method travels beyond the corporate setting into organisations that have to ship results with little margin for error. Key speaking topics Trend-driven innovation Consumer and customer expectations Strategic foresight People-first AI strategy Future of retail, work and cities Business model innovation Growth strategy Ideal for CSOs and heads of strategy commissioning a multi-year innovation agenda CMOs and customer experience leaders recalibrating propositions against shifting expectations Chief innovation officers and transformation leads looking for a repeatable method, not a trend deck Executive offsites and board sessions opening a decade-horizon strategy conversation Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for distinguishing durable consumer shifts from short-cycle noise A working framework for translating trend signals into specific innovation bets A sharper view of where generative AI changes the economics of their category, and where it does not Concrete examples of how peer-scale organisations have already moved, drawn from cross-sector research A clear set of questions to take back to strategy, product and marketing teams

Why organisations work with Huy Nguyen Trieu Two decades inside tier-one banks (Citi, Royal Bank of Scotland, Société Générale) paired with co-founding CFTE, a capability platform that has reached more than 200,000 professionals across 130 countries, gives him a view neither pure bankers nor pure technologists can offer. His work names the specific mechanisms by which AI is reshaping institutions, drawing on frameworks developed at CFTE including the AI Capability Engine, the Performance Hexagon, the CDE Innovation Prism and the SHIME skills model. Boards and policymakers use him to pressure-test AI strategy against what is actually deployable, including a strategy briefing for the senior leadership of a top-five global financial institution and a full-day executive programme for a major central bank with over 100 senior leaders. Author of “The AI-fication of Jobs” (2024) and co-author of “The Fintech Job Report” (2022), both of which set out workforce impact in numbers executives can use for planning. Council Member of the ADI Foundation, Industry Fellow at Imperial College Business School, and former member of the World Economic Forum’s Fintech Advisory Board, so his work holds up in front of regulators and sovereign actors as well as operators. Biography highlights Co-founder, Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE), reaching more than 200,000 professionals across 130 countries. Council Member, ADI Foundation, contributing to sovereign blockchain infrastructure including national stablecoins and digital public infrastructure. Former Managing Director at Citi, with earlier roles at Royal Bank of Scotland and Société Générale; founding partner of Supercharger, one of Asia’s largest fintech accelerators; former CEO of Ukibi, a venture-backed US technology start-up. Graduate of MIT and École Polytechnique; first Fintech Resident at Oxford Saïd Business School; Industry Fellow at Imperial College Business School; former member of the World Economic Forum’s Fintech Advisory Board. Author of “The AI-fication of Jobs” (2024); co-author of “The Fintech Job Report: Technology is eating Finance” (2022). Commentary on AI in financial services featured in international business media including the Financial Times, Bloomberg and CNBC. Biography Most banks have been running digital transformation programmes for a decade. The harder question now reaches further than banking. Governments, central banks and financial institutions all face the same problem: translating AI from pilots into operating capability that holds up under regulation and talent constraints. That is the terrain Huy Nguyen Trieu has worked on from both sides. He spent years at Citi, finishing as a Managing Director, with earlier roles at Royal Bank of Scotland and Société Générale. Before banking he was CEO of Ukibi, a venture-backed US technology start-up, and was later a founding partner of Supercharger, one of Asia’s largest fintech accelerators. The mix means he reads an institution’s P&L the way an operator does and reads a technology bet the way an investor does. He co-founded CFTE, the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship. It now reaches more than 200,000 professionals across 130 countries and works with governments, central banks and financial institutions on AI capability at scale. CFTE’s frameworks, including the AI Capability Engine, the Performance Hexagon, the CDE Innovation Prism and the SHIME skills model, are the spine of that work. He was the first Fintech Resident at Oxford Saïd Business School and is an Industry Fellow at Imperial College Business School. He also serves as a Council Member of the ADI Foundation, contributing to sovereign blockchain infrastructure for emerging markets. Recent engagements illustrate the scope. He delivered a keynote on the third wave of AI in the presence of H.E. the President of the Republic of Cyprus. Other engagements include a strategy briefing for a top-five global financial institution and a full-day executive programme for a major central bank with more than 100 senior leaders. His book “The AI-fication of Jobs” (2024) explains why AI breaks the historical assumption that new technology creates more jobs than it destroys. Key speaking topics Fintech and the future of financial services AI in banking and capital markets Digital business models in regulated industries Platform economics and hyperscalable finance Future of work in financial services Digital assets and tokenisation Venture capital and fintech investment trends Ideal for Governments and central banks building AI capability across regulated sectors Bank and insurer boards setting AI and fintech strategy CEOs, COOs and CIOs of financial institutions running transformation agendas Heads of innovation, strategy and HR grappling with workforce impact of AI Audience outcomes A clearer read on which fintech and AI shifts are structural and which are overstated. Specific examples of business-model change from inside banks, fintechs and big tech, not generic case studies. A workforce view: which roles in finance shrink, which expand, and what skills leaders should build now. A sharper frame for board-level conversations on AI risk, digital assets and platform strategy.

Why organisations work with Jacco van der Kooij He built the operating language that serious SaaS revenue teams already use. Bowtie, SPICED and Revenue Architecture are not proprietary curiosities; they are the common vocabulary at companies like DocuSign, Uber Eats, Adobe and MURAL. His work treats go-to-market as a designed system, not a set of sales tactics. Leadership teams leave with a structural view of acquisition, retention and expansion as one connected revenue engine. He has operating credibility from inside enterprise technology. Senior roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks, so the advice is grounded in execution, not theory. He is published where serious readers look. Harvard Business Review (with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School) and a shelf of best-selling books including Revenue Architecture and Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization. He advises the capital side, not just the operating side. Growth advisory to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures gives him a cross-portfolio view of what compounds and what breaks. Biography highlights Founder of Winning by Design, a go-to-market consulting and training firm working with hundreds of recurring-revenue companies worldwide. Creator of the Bowtie customer-journey model, the SPICED qualification framework and the Revenue Architecture operating model. Author of Revenue Architecture (2023) and co-author of Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization and The SaaS Sales Method series. Co-author with Frank V. Cespedes of the Harvard Business Review article “Hiring Star Salespeople Isn’t the Best Way to Grow” (February 2016). Clients and training partners include Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and OwnBackup. Growth advisor to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures. Keynote speaker at Dreamforce, SaaStock Dublin, SaaS Growth London, MarketingProfs and RD Summit Brazil. Biography Recurring revenue rewrote the economics of B2B software, but most companies still run sales, customer success and marketing as separate departments with separate targets. Winning by Design, the firm Jacco van der Kooij founded in 2012, exists to correct that. The core of his work is a set of frameworks that have become standard vocabulary inside serious SaaS revenue teams. The Bowtie extends the funnel into onboarding, adoption and expansion, so leadership can see acquisition and retention as one connected system. SPICED gives every customer-facing function a shared qualification model. Revenue Architecture, the 2023 textbook of over 250 diagrams and blueprints, ties the two into an operating design for recurring-revenue growth. His authority is grounded in operating history before it is grounded in publishing. Senior sales and strategy roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks. Harvard Business Review published his co-authored work with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School on why hiring star salespeople is a weaker growth lever than organisational design, a piece that now reads as the seed of the larger thesis. Today his focus is how compounding growth systems behave under AI. He advises executive teams and venture capital firms, including Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures, on redesigning go-to-market operating models where probabilistic modelling and AI-enabled workflows replace linear funnel thinking. The training side of the business has equipped revenue teams at Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL and Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the same operating language. Key speaking topics Revenue Architecture for recurring-revenue businesses The Bowtie customer-journey model SPICED qualification and customer conversations Go-to-market operating design for B2B SaaS AI-enabled go-to-market and probabilistic growth modelling Sales organisation design and scaling Executive growth governance Ideal for CROs, CCOs, VPs of Sales and VPs of Customer Success rebuilding the revenue engine around recurring revenue B2B SaaS founders and executive teams moving from founder-led selling into scaled, systematised go-to-market Venture capital firms and boards overseeing growth-stage portfolio companies Corporate transformation leaders inside enterprise technology businesses shifting to subscription or consumption models Audience outcomes A shared operating language across sales, marketing and customer success that replaces siloed vocabulary. A structural view of the full customer journey through the Bowtie, from acquisition into retention and expansion. A working grasp of SPICED as a qualification and conversation model any customer-facing team can deploy. A clearer read on where AI meaningfully changes go-to-market design and where it is overclaimed. Specific diagnostic questions leadership teams can use to locate the actual bottleneck in their growth system.

Why organisations work with Jack Stratten Pattern recognition grounded in fieldwork. Insider Trends runs retail safaris in London, New York, Tokyo and Seoul, which means his examples come from stores he has physically been inside, not slide decks recycled from conference circuits. A named RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer in both 2023 and 2024, giving buyers a third-party signal of standing in the retail community. Direct experience advising Nike, LVMH, Ikea, Marks and Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover and Microsoft on retail formats and customer experience, so the frame of reference fits enterprise decision-makers. Works across the full retail stack, from store roles and staff models to omnichannel, supply chain and sustainability, which lets a single session connect teams that usually plan in silos. Format flexibility. Keynote, boardroom session, trend workshop or guided retail safari, all drawn from the same underlying research base. Biography highlights Head of Trends, Insider Trends, a London-based retail futures agency advising C-suite clients globally. Selected for RETHINK Retail’s Top Retail Influencers list in 2023 and 2024. Clients include Nike, Johnson and Johnson, Converse, Ikea, Shell, Marks and Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover, Costa Coffee, Diageo, Microsoft, LVMH, Nespresso, Twilio, The National Trust and Galeries Lafayette. Has run trend seminars for senior business audiences in partnership with the British Library. Media commentator on retail change, including appearances on Channel 4 and BBC Radio 5. Published author on Insider Trends and contributor to industry outlets including Retail Technology Innovation Hub. Biography Physical stores, e-commerce, app, social commerce, marketplace listings, supply chain footprint. For most retailers these are still governed as separate projects with separate owners, even though a single customer now moves across all of them inside one buying decision. That gap between how customers shop and how retailers are organised is the core tension Jack Stratten’s work addresses. As Head of Trends at Insider Trends, a London-based retail futures agency, he sits on top of a continuous research engine that tracks new store formats, brand experiences and commercial models in the cities where retail is evolving fastest. The agency’s client list spans Nike, LVMH, Ikea, Marks and Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover, Microsoft and Galeries Lafayette, and the work typically lands as a keynote, a boardroom session, a workshop, or a guided retail safari through live stores. The value to a leadership team is diagnostic as much as inspirational. Stratten is good at naming which shifts are real signals versus which are noise, which store formats actually drive commercial outcomes, and where omnichannel investment translates into loyalty rather than cost. RETHINK Retail named him one of its Top Retail Influencers in both 2023 and 2024, a practitioner-voted signal that buyers in the sector recognise his read on the category. What separates his sessions from a standard retail trends talk is the grounding. The examples are stores he has walked, brands his team has studied in depth, and commercial decisions he has watched play out, which makes the content usable inside a planning cycle rather than a year-end inspiration slot. Key speaking topics Retail trends and customer behaviour Omnichannel strategy Store of the future and new retail formats Customer experience in consumer brands Retail innovation and business model change Sustainability in retail and supply chain Direct to consumer and brand experience Ideal for Retail and consumer goods executive teams setting store, channel and format strategy. Heads of customer experience, digital and e-commerce aligning on a single commercial plan. Property, leasing and shopping centre leadership rethinking the role of physical space. Senior marketing and brand leaders in consumer categories adjacent to retail. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which retail shifts are material signals and which are surface noise. Concrete examples of store formats, brand experiences and omnichannel models that are working in 2025, with the commercial logic behind them. A shared vocabulary across store, digital, marketing and supply chain teams for the next planning cycle. Specific prompts for where to test, invest or pull back in the next 12 to 24 months. A sharper sense of how consumer brands and retailers are redefining the role of the store.

Why organisations work with Jaideep Prabhu He wrote the books that put frugal innovation on the boardroom agenda. “Jugaad Innovation” and “Frugal Innovation” are the reference texts, and the latter won the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year in 2016. He connects innovation theory to what is actually happening in India, China, Brazil and Africa, not as case studies but as strategic signal for Western firms facing the same constraints a decade later. His work travels into public policy. “How Should a Government Be?” takes the same logic on digital, lean operations and citizen value, and applies it to how state power is now exercised. He holds two chairs at Cambridge Judge Business School and is a Fellow of the British Academy, which means the frameworks have been pressure-tested by academic peers, not only by consultants. Biography highlights Professor of Marketing and Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise, Cambridge Judge Business School Director of the Centre for India and Global Business at Cambridge Judge Business School Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge Co-author of “Jugaad Innovation” (Jossey-Bass, 2012) and “Frugal Innovation” (Economist Books / Profile Books, 2015), winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2016 Author of “How Should a Government Be? The New Levers of State Power” (Profile Books, 2021) Commentary and profiles in The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, The Times, Le Monde, BBC News, BBC Radio 4 and Bloomberg BusinessWeek Biography “Jugaad” is the Hindi word for an ingenious, improvised fix. In 2012, Jaideep Prabhu and his co-authors turned it into a serious argument about how Western firms should learn to innovate when money, time and certainty are all in shorter supply. That book, and its successor “Frugal Innovation”, reframed a generation of conversations about growth under constraint. Prabhu holds two chairs at Cambridge Judge Business School: Professor of Marketing and the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise. He directs the Centre for India and Global Business, and sits as a Fellow of the British Academy and of Clare College, Cambridge. The research sits where marketing, innovation, strategy and international business meet, with a steady focus on what firms in emerging economies are teaching firms everywhere else. “Frugal Innovation”, co-written with Navi Radjou and published with The Economist, won the Chartered Management Institute’s Management Book of the Year in 2016. His 2021 book “How Should a Government Be? The New Levers of State Power” extended the same question beyond companies, arguing that digital infrastructure, lean operations and new organisational forms are reshaping what governments can credibly deliver. The through-line is practical. Leaders who work with him come away with a clearer view of how to compete on creativity and economics at the same time, and a sharper sense of which constraints to design around and which to design with. Key speaking topics Frugal and jugaad innovation Business model innovation in emerging markets Growth strategy under constraint India and the global innovation economy Digital transformation in the public sector The future of government and state capacity Global marketing and competitive advantage Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting innovation and growth strategy for cost-sensitive or emerging markets CSOs, CMOs and heads of innovation looking to pressure-test portfolios against leaner competitors Public sector leaders, policy teams and ministers redesigning delivery around digital and citizen value Corporate India programmes, global leadership forums and any organisation with a serious India or emerging markets thesis Audience outcomes A working definition of frugal innovation that distinguishes it from cost-cutting and makes it usable at board level Named examples from India, China, Brazil and Africa of firms that built scale under constraint, and what they reveal about Western incumbents A framework for spotting which parts of the business model are most exposed to leaner competition and which offer the fastest route to reinvention For public sector audiences, a clearer view of the levers that modern states are using to deliver more with less Specific, citable references from the three books that senior teams can build internal conversations around

Why organisations work with James Sinclair He runs the playbook he teaches. The Partyman Group is a roughly GBP 40 million portfolio across childcare, leisure, food and beverage, and heritage brands that he owns and operates, not advises. He has a concrete thesis on why price-led consumer businesses fail, set out in The Experience Business, and can show operators how to apply it inside their own units. He has done the hardest part of growth through acquisition in public: the 2023 rescue of Party Pieces from administration is a documented case study in buying a broken consumer brand and absorbing it. He raised GBP 700,000 from 21 lenders at 20 years old without venture capital, and has built every subsequent business on cash flow. Founders who are bootstrapped or PE-averse hear their own constraints in his story. He is direct, funny, and pitched at operators rather than boardrooms. Audiences of SME owners, franchisees, and consumer brand teams tend to leave with something they can action on Monday. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Partyman Group: soft play centres, Twizzle Tops Day Nurseries, Marsh Farm Animal Adventure Park, Rossi Ice Cream, a grade II listed hotel, and Party Pieces. Acquired Party Pieces from the Middleton family out of administration in May 2023. Author of The Millionaire Clown and The Experience Business: Why Price-Focused Businesses Fail And What Winners Do Instead. Host of James Sinclair’s Business Broadcast podcast and a long-running YouTube channel focused on business operating decisions. Built the group without venture capital, funded through cash flow and lender-backed acquisitions. Speaks regularly across the UK and Europe to entrepreneur, SME, and franchise audiences. Biography Party Pieces was insolvent and more than GBP 2.5 million in debt when James Sinclair bought it out of administration in May 2023, adding the Middleton family’s party supplies brand to a portfolio that already included soft play centres, nurseries, a farm park, and Rossi Ice Cream. That kind of deal sits at the centre of how he has built the Partyman Group: find a distressed consumer business, buy it cheaply, and fold it into an operating model designed around experience rather than discounting. The group now reports turnover in the region of GBP 40 million. Sinclair built it without venture capital, starting at 16 as a children’s entertainer and, at 20, raising GBP 700,000 from 21 separate lenders to open his first soft play centre in Basildon. The first location hit GBP 1 million turnover inside a year. Every subsequent acquisition has been funded on cash flow and operator credibility, not equity rounds. His book The Experience Business sets out the thesis that underpins all of it: price-focused consumer businesses lose because customers are buying a feeling, and the winners are the operators who invest in the moments that feeling depends on. The Millionaire Clown, his earlier book, is the operator’s version of the same argument told through the businesses he has bought, broken, and fixed. What buyers get when they book him is not a strategist commenting on a sector. It is an owner-operator describing, specifically, how he grew a multi-brand consumer group through acquisition, what he overpaid for, what he did not, and how he keeps experience from degrading as the portfolio scales. The register is closer to a founders’ workshop than a keynote, which is why he tends to land well with SME and franchise audiences. Key speaking topics Growth through acquisition in consumer businesses Buying and turning around distressed brands Experience-led differentiation over price competition Building multi-brand portfolios without venture capital Cash flow, profitability, and operator discipline Customer acquisition for consumer and leisure brands Entrepreneurship and founder-led scaling Ideal for SME founders and owner-operators scaling consumer businesses Franchise networks and multi-site leisure, hospitality, and childcare operators M&A and corporate development leads working on distressed consumer assets Entrepreneur conferences, business schools, and founder communities Audience outcomes A working mental model for when to compete on experience and when price still matters A concrete view of how to evaluate a distressed consumer business before buying it Operator-level tactics for protecting customer experience as a portfolio adds brands A bootstrapped founder’s case for funding growth through cash flow and lenders rather than equity Specific stories, including Party Pieces, that audiences can pattern-match against their own deals

Why organisations work with Jamie Anderson He brings a working academic’s command of strategy and innovation research, not a recycled consultancy deck. His articles sit in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and Business Strategy Review, and he teaches the material at Antwerp Management School. His Lady Gaga and contemporary-art case work is the rare strategy content that lands with mixed senior audiences. It is taken seriously by London Business School’s journal yet readable for a leadership team without an MBA. He has built and taught executive programmes at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, which means his frame of reference is global executive practice, not one country or one sector. He is a Case Centre top-50 bestselling author, with a Nespresso case among the global prize winners. Buyers get a speaker whose teaching cases are actually used by other faculty. Financial Times named him a “management guru”; Business Strategy Review placed him among the world’s top 25 management thinkers. The credentialling is from named bodies, not bureau description. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation, Antwerp Management School. Faculty and visiting positions at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin, and Indian School of Business. Co-author, The Fine Art of Success (Wiley), and author of the Gaganomics / Strategy Gaga case work. Articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal. The Case Centre Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors (No. 33 in 2021/22; No. 28 in 2020/21); winner of a global case prize for his Nespresso case. Named “management guru” by the Financial Times; listed among the world’s top 25 management thinkers by Business Strategy Review. Biography The classic strategy textbook assumed advantage was something a firm could build and defend. The leaders running large organisations now treat that assumption as a liability. The question is no longer how to protect a position, but how to keep generating new ones at the cadence the market demands. Anderson’s work sits inside that question. As Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Antwerp Management School, with faculty experience at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, he has spent two decades translating innovation research into language operating leaders can use. His articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are the same material he teaches in executive programmes, written for practitioners. The signature of his work is its source material. Where most strategy speakers reach for the same handful of case studies, Anderson has built much of his teaching from artists and pop-culture figures, most famously his Lady Gaga case (Strategy Gaga / Gaganomics) and the book The Fine Art of Success. Business Strategy Review named the Lady Gaga article one of the top pieces of its year. The cases work because the underlying strategy is rigorous, and the surface is readable for a non-specialist audience. The recognition is from named bodies. The Financial Times has called him a management guru. Business Strategy Review put him among the top 25 management thinkers. The Case Centre lists him as a top-50 bestselling case author across multiple years, which is the closest the academic strategy world gets to a market test of whether other faculty actually use your work. Key speaking topics Strategic innovation and business model design Sustaining competitive advantage in mature industries Creativity and the strategy of contemporary brands Digital transformation and customer experience Leadership for innovation Personal strategy and career reinvention Ideal for Boards and executive committees rebuilding the innovation pipeline behind a mature core business CSOs, heads of strategy and corporate development teams in large incumbents CMOs and CXOs working on brand and customer-experience reinvention Senior leadership offsites where strategy content needs to land with a mixed, non-specialist audience Audience outcomes A clearer read on why traditional sources of competitive advantage are eroding, and what is replacing them Concrete cases of organisations and brands that have engineered new advantage in mature markets A working vocabulary for strategic innovation drawn from current management research, not consultancy framing A perspective on creativity and brand strategy that connects to operating decisions, not just marketing Energy. The Lady Gaga, Madonna and contemporary-art material is the rare strategy content senior audiences actually quote afterwards

Why organisations work with Jan Peter Balkenende Eight years leading a G20 economy through financial crisis, EU enlargement and the 2004 Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union gives him a view from inside the machine that almost no executive adviser can match. His book with Govert Buijs, “Capitalism Reconnected” (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), sets out a specific European alternative to both Chinese state capitalism and American shareholder capitalism, which boards can use as a reference point for their own strategy. As chair of the Dutch Sustainable Growth Coalition he convenes AkzoNobel, dsm-firmenich, FrieslandCampina, Heineken, KLM, Philips, Shell and Unilever around common sustainability positions, so he speaks with current standing, not archive authority. Minister of State status in the Netherlands and membership of Club de Madrid keep him close to working heads of government, which gives audiences a read on political risk that goes beyond press coverage. He pairs the institutional authority of a former PM with the working vocabulary of a senior adviser at EY and Hague Corporate Affairs, so corporate audiences get policy insight translated into commercial language. Biography highlights Prime Minister of the Netherlands 2002 to 2010, across four cabinets. Held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2004. Professor Emeritus of Governance, Institutions and Internationalisation, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Minister of State, Kingdom of the Netherlands, since October 2022. Chair of the Dutch Sustainable Growth Coalition; Chair of the Noaber Foundation; Executive Board member, Global Center on Adaptation; Member, Club de Madrid. External Senior Advisor to EY; Associate Partner at Hague Corporate Affairs. Co-author, “Capitalism Reconnected: Toward a Sustainable, Inclusive and Innovative Market Economy in Europe” (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). Biography European economies are being asked to reinvent themselves at the same time as they govern themselves. Jan Peter Balkenende has spent more than two decades inside that tension, first as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 2002 to 2010 and then as an adviser, academic and convenor of corporate leaders. Four successive cabinets and the 2004 Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union gave him direct experience of how EU decisions are actually made, from enlargement to financial crisis response. That institutional memory now sits alongside a current role as Minister of State and as a member of Club de Madrid, the association of former heads of government. His intellectual contribution is set out in “Capitalism Reconnected,” co-written with political philosopher Govert Buijs and published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024. The book argues that Europe should stop defending its model defensively and instead frame a sustainable, inclusive and innovative market economy as a distinct offer, positioned between Chinese state capitalism and American shareholder capitalism. The argument is not theoretical for him. As chair of the Dutch Sustainable Growth Coalition he works with the CEOs of AkzoNobel, dsm-firmenich, FrieslandCampina, Heineken, KLM, Philips, Shell and Unilever on shared positions around climate, circularity and social equality, supported by VNO-NCW and facilitated by Accenture. Erasmus University Rotterdam, EY and Hague Corporate Affairs provide the academic and advisory base. The through-line, across government, campus and corporate rooms, is the same: Europe can only lead on sustainability if its companies and its institutions work from the same playbook. Key speaking topics European market-economy reform Sustainable and inclusive growth strategy Governance and public-private collaboration ESG and corporate responsibility in European context Geopolitical and policy risk for business Institutional leadership and long-term decision making Climate adaptation and the role of business Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting European sustainability and ESG strategy CEOs and CFOs navigating EU regulation, climate policy and geopolitical risk Public-sector and multilateral audiences working on public-private cooperation Leadership and strategy summits with a European or transatlantic agenda Audience outcomes A concrete reference framework, drawn from “Capitalism Reconnected,” for positioning a European business between state-led and shareholder-led models. A clearer read on how EU-level decisions are made, and where corporate influence actually lands. Live examples of how eight Dutch multinationals translate sustainable growth commitments into joint positions. A sharper sense of which political risks matter for strategy, and which are noise. Direct perspective from a former head of government on leading through crisis with contested public trust.

Why organisations work with Javier Goyeneche He built a profitable circular fashion brand from waste streams that most of the industry still treats as someone else’s problem: discarded fishing nets, post-consumer PET, used tyres, and post-industrial cotton. He runs Upcycling the Oceans, a working supply chain of almost 5,000 fishermen across 83 Mediterranean ports that has recovered around 2,000 tonnes of marine waste since 2015. It is a named operational system, not a campaign. ECOALF became the first Spanish fashion company to certify as a B Corp in 2018 and sits in the top 5% globally in the environment category. Boards questioning the credibility of their own ESG claims recognise the standard. He gives leaders a direct account of the commercial trade-offs of circularity: why ECOALF refuses Black Friday, why 74% of its latest collection is single-material, and how the business still reached profitability. Thinkers50 Radar listing (2019) and the Schwab Foundation Social Innovator of the Year award (2020) place him in the small group of sustainability founders whose work has been independently examined, including in a published IMD case study. Biography highlights Founder and President of ECOALF, launched in Madrid in 2009. Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2019. Schwab Foundation Social Innovator of the Year, 2020. Leads the ECOALF Foundation and its Upcycling the Oceans programme, operating across 83 Mediterranean ports. Previously founded Fun and Basics in 1995, growing it to 350 points of sale and 70 branded stores before exiting. Subject of the IMD case study “ECOALF: Because there is no Planet B” by Benoit Leleux and Thomas Brochier. Biography Most fashion brands describe sustainability as a value. ECOALF treats it as an input constraint. The brand that Javier Goyeneche founded in Madrid in 2009 was built around a single operating question: can a fashion business be assembled entirely from recovered waste and still make money. It is now stocked in more than 1,500 stores worldwide and has been profitable since 2021. The raw materials tell most of the story. ECOALF manufactures from post-consumer PET bottles, discarded fishing nets, used tyres, coffee grounds, and post-industrial cotton and wool. The Upcycling the Oceans programme, run through the ECOALF Foundation, works with close to 5,000 fishermen across 83 Mediterranean ports and has recovered around 2,000 tonnes of marine waste since 2015. The supply chain is physical, named, and audited. The commercial discipline is the part boards tend to notice. ECOALF does not run seasonal sales, does not participate in Black Friday, and has pushed 74% of its latest collection into single-material garments so that items can be recycled at end of life. In 2018 it became the first Spanish fashion brand to certify as a B Corp, and in 2022 was named “Best for the World” in the environment category, placing it in the top 5% of the 5,000 B Corps globally. The recognition follows the work rather than leading it. Thinkers50 put Goyeneche on its Radar in 2019, the Schwab Foundation named him Social Innovator of the Year in 2020, and IMD has published a business-school case study on the model. For leadership teams trying to close the distance between their ESG commitments and their operating decisions, his value is specific. He has already made those trade-offs and can show where the numbers broke and where they held. Key speaking topics Circular business models in practice Sustainable and regenerative supply chains B Corp certification and corporate accountability Ocean plastic and waste recovery at scale Sustainable fashion and textile innovation Purpose-led entrepreneurship ESG credibility and greenwashing Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting sustainability strategy who need an operator’s view of what circularity costs and delivers. Consumer, retail, and industrial leadership teams under pressure to translate ESG commitments into supply-chain decisions. Founders and commercial leaders building purpose-led businesses who want the honest commercial arithmetic behind a Thinkers50-recognised model. Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how a circular business model functions end to end, from waste sourcing to single-material garment design to retail policy. A sharper test for their own sustainability claims against B Corp-grade standards. Language for the trade-offs involved in refusing discount-driven growth channels while remaining commercially viable. An operator’s account of how a multi-stakeholder supply chain, in this case with fishing communities across 83 Mediterranean ports, actually gets built.

Why organisations work with Jennifer Hyman She has run the full arc of a venture-backed consumer subscription business, from a Harvard Business School idea in 2008 to a $1.7 billion IPO in 2021, and can speak to each stage with named decisions rather than highlight-reel anecdotes. She led Rent the Runway through a near-existential 2020, when its core demand collapsed overnight, and reset the cost base, capital structure and product. Boards under pressure want that recovery story from the operator who lived it. She sits on the board of The Estee Lauder Companies and advises Goldman Sachs through the Launch With GS council, giving her a working view of how large incumbents think about disruption from the inside. She is one of only 30 women to have taken a US company public and the first to do so with an all-female CEO, COO and CFO line-up. That credential travels well in conversations about leadership pipeline and capital access. She speaks from the operator seat on how AI is changing what a customer relationship actually is, drawing on Rent the Runway’s own use of data and personalisation rather than abstract framing. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway since 2009; Chair of the Board. Took Rent the Runway public in October 2021, raising $357 million. Board Director, The Estee Lauder Companies. Audit Committee and Nominating and ESG Committee. Founding member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council. Adviser to Goldman Sachs via the Launch With GS Council. Named to TIME 100 Most Influential People (2019); Fortune 40 Under 40; Fast Company Most Creative People in Business; Forbes 12 Most Disruptive Names in Business. BA in social sciences and MBA, Harvard University. Biography Rent the Runway started as a Harvard Business School project in late 2008 and reached public markets in October 2021 as the first US listing led by an all-female CEO, COO and CFO trio. The company raised $357 million and listed at a $1.7 billion valuation. The person who built it from idea to ticker is Jennifer Hyman, co-founder, CEO and Chair of the Board. The interesting period for boards is not the launch. It is what happened after. The pandemic took out Rent the Runway’s core demand, weddings, events, office wear, almost overnight in early 2020. Hyman cut costs, restructured debt, reworked the subscription product, and brought the business through to IPO eighteen months later. She has since had to defend the model against shifting consumer behaviour, capital market repricing of growth, and the entry of larger players into resale and rental. Outside the operator role, Hyman serves on the Board of Directors of The Estee Lauder Companies, on its Audit Committee and Nominating and ESG Committee. She is a founding member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council and sits on the Launch With GS Advisory Council for Goldman Sachs, where the brief is improving capital access for female and diverse founders. She was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list in 2019, with the profile written by Diane von Furstenberg. Hyman’s value in a board conversation is the texture of having actually done the things most strategy decks describe. She can speak to category creation, to subscription unit economics under stress, to the use of AI in personalisation and inventory, and to the politics of taking a venture-backed consumer business through a public listing without losing operational grip. Key speaking topics Subscription business model design Category creation in consumer markets Recovery and reset after demand shock AI in consumer personalisation and inventory Capital access for founders and underrepresented operators Founder-CEO journey through IPO Ideal for Boards and executive teams reviewing strategy under model pressure CEO and CFO audiences in consumer, retail, fashion and subscription businesses Investor and capital-markets events focused on founder access to capital Women’s leadership and pipeline programmes at senior levels Audience outcomes A clear-eyed account of what category creation actually costs from someone who has done it A working view of how a venture-backed CEO restructures a business through a demand shock Insight into how AI is being used in subscription consumer businesses today, with named examples from Rent the Runway A senior-operator perspective on the IPO process and post-listing reality Specific arguments for how capital access changes when founder pipelines change

Why organisations work with Jenny Fleiss She has built a consumer business from a Harvard Business School idea to a publicly listed company, and a separate venture inside Walmart’s Store No. 8 incubator. That gives a board credible answers on both routes into a new market. She speaks from inside the operating cockpit of conversational commerce and AI-driven personalisation, not from a strategist’s deck. Jetblack used text and machine learning to handle real customer requests at scale. Her seat at Initialized Capital and prior investing work put her across hundreds of early-stage decks in e-commerce, consumer and AI. She can tell a corporate audience which startup behaviours are worth importing and which are noise. She brings board-level perspective from listed and private companies including The Lanvin Group, Shutterfly and Rent the Runway, which lets her translate founder language into governance language an audit and risk committee will understand. Biography highlights Co-founder and board member, Rent the Runway, the New York-listed designer rental company she started with Jennifer Hyman in 2008. Founder and former CEO of Jetblack, the conversational commerce startup launched inside Walmart’s Store No. 8 incubator in 2018. Former Partner at Initialized Capital, the seed-stage venture firm, where she led e-commerce, consumer and AI investing. Independent director, The Lanvin Group (since 2022); board member, Shutterfly (since 2019); board member, Arteza. MBA, Harvard Business School; BA in Political Science, Yale University, cum laude. Recognised on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 (2012), Inc. 30 Under 30 (2010), Forbes Disruptors 2013, and Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology. Biography Renting a designer dress through a website was not an obvious business in 2008. Jenny Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman started Rent the Runway from a Harvard Business School idea and turned it into a publicly listed consumer company. The work needed to be done in unglamorous places: dry cleaning logistics, returns flows, fit data, inventory forecasting. The brand sat on top of an operations problem. A decade later, Walmart asked her to build a startup inside its corporate body. Jetblack was a text-based, AI-assisted personal shopping service for high-spending New York households, incubated inside Store No. 8. The product taught Walmart what conversational commerce actually costs to run, what humans still have to do behind the model, and where machine learning genuinely earns its keep in retail. That double track, founder of a venture-backed unicorn and intrapreneur inside a Fortune 1 retailer, is what makes her useful in a corporate room. She has lived the trade-offs between speed and brand risk, between founder autonomy and parent-company governance, between AI promise and operating reality. Her investing work at Initialized Capital and as an angel adds a third lens: which early-stage signals are worth a corporate’s attention and which are theatre. Her board work at The Lanvin Group, Shutterfly, Rent the Runway and Arteza puts her in front of the same governance questions her audiences face. Boards want innovation, but they also want explanations. Key speaking topics Building and scaling consumer internet businesses Conversational commerce and AI in retail Corporate venture building and intrapreneurship Customer data and personalisation at scale Female founders and the funding gap Early-stage investing in consumer and AI Board governance for innovation programmes Ideal for CEOs and divisional presidents in retail, consumer goods and direct-to-consumer brands Heads of innovation, corporate venture and new ventures inside large incumbents Chief digital, chief data and chief AI officers responsible for customer-facing AI deployment Founder communities, accelerator cohorts and women-in-business leadership programmes Audience outcomes A clearer view of which startup behaviours translate into a corporate parent and which collapse on contact with it. A working vocabulary for what conversational commerce and AI personalisation actually require to run at scale. A board-level frame for sponsoring internal ventures: what to measure, what to protect, when to wind down. A grounded read on the current early-stage consumer and AI investment market from someone who has sat on both sides of the table.

Why organisations work with JJ Delgado He runs a corporate venturing unit inside a century-old beverages group, so his AI and digital arguments are backed by current P&L responsibility, not consulting distance. His Amazon background gives him a working view of how the world’s most operationally disciplined digital company actually builds growth, which he translates for non-digital natives. He works across both EMEA and LATAM markets, useful for groups whose digital strategy has to land in mature and emerging consumer markets at once. He brings a named portfolio of work across Burger King, Pepsi, Ford, Bosch, Siemens, Vodafone, and Telefonica, which means his case material is recognisable to senior commercial audiences. Biography highlights General Manager, MOVE Estrella Galicia Digital, the open innovation and digital ventures unit of Hijos de Rivera. Former Head of Marketing, Southern Europe, at Amazon, where he led the company’s largest international sales day at the time. PhD Cum Laude in Digital Economy; MBA from London School of Business and Finance. Guest teaching at the London School of Economics and IE Business School on digital economy and consumer behaviour. Author of three books published on Amazon, including Smash It, an Amazon international bestseller in 2021. Named #1 Amazon LinkedIn profile in the UK across 2016 and early 2017 (self-reported ranking). Biography Amazon’s largest international sales day at the time was run out of Southern Europe by a marketing team led by JJ Delgado. That experience, three years inside the operational engine of the world’s most disciplined digital retailer, is the spine of his work today. He moved from running Amazon’s marketing in the region to running a digital ventures unit inside a legacy corporate, which is a more useful vantage point for the audiences he now speaks to. He is General Manager of MOVE Estrella Galicia Digital, the corporate venturing and open innovation arm of Hijos de Rivera, the Spanish beverages group behind Estrella Galicia. The remit is to build and scale new digital businesses for a company whose core is 100 years old, and to invest in startups that can accelerate that shift. The role gives him live operating responsibility for the questions he speaks on: AI deployment, Web3 commerce, and how a non-digital-native organisation actually generates new revenue from new technology. His commercial track record spans 15 years across EMEA and LATAM, with named work for Burger King, Pepsi, Hertz, Ford, Bosch, Siemens, Vodafone, Telefonica, and Estrella Galicia. He holds a PhD Cum Laude in Digital Economy and teaches as a guest at the London School of Economics and IE Business School. He has written three books on Amazon, the most recent being Smash It, an international bestseller on the platform in 2021, and runs an AI-focused newsletter with a large subscriber base. What makes him useful to boards is the angle of attack. He is not an academic on AI, nor a consultant pitching frameworks. He is an operator who has run digital growth inside Amazon and now runs new business creation inside a traditional corporate, and he speaks from that seat. Key speaking topics AI and ChatGPT in commercial operations Digital transformation in legacy corporates Web3 and new digital business models Consumer behaviour and the emotion behind the click Corporate venturing and open innovation Voice and conversational interfaces (Alexa as customer channel) Ideal for CMOs and chief digital officers in non-digital-native organisations Corporate venturing, innovation, and new business leads Senior commercial and growth leadership teams across EMEA and LATAM Boards weighing AI and Web3 investment decisions Audience outcomes A working view of how Amazon actually built growth from inside one of its regional marketing teams A concrete picture of what AI deployment looks like inside an operating business unit, not a pilot Recognisable case material from named global brands across consumer, automotive, and telecoms A clearer sense of where Web3 has commercial traction and where it does not