Innovation og disruption

Why organisations work with Byron Reese He places today’s AI moment inside a 100,000-year arc of technology shifts, giving senior leaders a framework for long-range decisions that vendor briefings cannot supply. As CEO of Gigaom, he sits at the intersection of independent technology analysis and operating leadership, which lets him speak to both the engineering reality and the boardroom question. His five books, published by Simon & Schuster and BenBella, take positions on machine consciousness, automation, and the future of work that are specific and contestable, not generic optimism. He addresses AI without the doom-or-hype binary that dominates the speaking circuit, which is what most leadership audiences are quietly asking for. Biography highlights CEO and publisher of Gigaom, an independent technology research firm. Author of five books, including The Fourth Age (Simon & Schuster, 2018), described by The New York Times as “entertaining and engaging”. Founder of multiple technology companies, with two NASDAQ IPOs and several US patents to his name. Hosts podcasts on artificial intelligence, including Voices in AI and The Agora Podcast. Featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg Businessweek, USA Today and the Financial Times. Bloomberg Businessweek credited him with “quietly pioneer[ing] a new breed of media company”. Biography Most futurists work in five-year horizons because that is what corporate planning cycles demand. The cost is that the most important question, which is what AI actually does to the human story, gets answered by analogy and anecdote rather than by argument. Byron Reese works in a different timeframe. In The Fourth Age, published by Simon & Schuster in 2018, he argues that technology has reshaped humanity three times: fire and language, agriculture and cities, the wheel and writing. Artificial intelligence and robotics, he argues, are now driving the fourth. The book reframes machine consciousness, automation and the future of work as questions of philosophy and history rather than software roadmaps, and The New York Times called it “entertaining and engaging”. His credibility is operational as well as intellectual. As CEO and publisher of Gigaom, he runs one of the better-known independent technology research firms. Before that he founded and sold multiple companies, took two through NASDAQ IPOs, and built consumer internet platforms that Bloomberg Businessweek described as “a new breed of media company”. He holds several US patents in crowdsourcing and content technology. Reese is, by his own description, the “Future of” guy: he has written and spoken on the future of AI, work, banking, education, agriculture, and the planet. His later books, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think and We Are Agora, extend the same long-range argument into how humans forecast and how human collectives behave. The thread that connects all of it, and the reason boards keep booking him, is that he is willing to take a position on where this is going. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and the future of work The long arc of technology and human civilisation Automation and workforce redesign Machine consciousness and AI ethics Innovation in conditions of rapid technological change Reasoned optimism as a leadership stance on technology The future of education, banking and agriculture Ideal for Boards and executive teams setting long-range AI and automation strategy CHROs and workforce planners redesigning roles around AI capability Innovation and strategy leaders in financial services, education and industrial sectors Conference audiences looking for a substantive counterweight to AI hype and AI doom Audience outcomes A clearer mental model of where AI sits in the longer history of human technology Sharper questions for internal AI strategy conversations, particularly on workforce and capital allocation A credible counter-position to the dominant doom-or-hype framing of AI in the press A specific account of how automation reshapes employment, drawn from Reese’s published argument rather than generic forecasts Renewed confidence that leadership decisions on technology can be made with intellectual rigour, not faith

Why organisations work with Candice Matthews Brackeen She invests her own fund’s capital into the same founder profile most institutions struggle to reach, which makes her perspective on deal flow operational rather than advocacy-led. She built and now owns Black Tech Week, the largest US convening of Black founders, investors and corporate partners, giving her direct visibility on which company-building patterns are working at scale. She testified before the US House Financial Services Committee in 2025 on expanding capital access beyond Silicon Valley, a credibility marker few speakers on this topic hold. She translates between corporate procurement, venture capital and underrepresented founder communities, the three groups that rarely sit in the same conversation despite all needing each other. Wall Street Journal named her one of the Top 10 Women in Venture Capital in 2020, a recognition that signals investor peers, not bureau marketing, rate her work. Biography highlights General Partner, Lightship Capital, a Cincinnati venture fund backing underrepresented founders in CPG, e-commerce, sustainability, AI and healthcare. Founder and CEO, Lightship Foundation, whose accelerator alumni have raised more than $100M in follow-on funding. Co-founder, Hillman Accelerator, the first Midwest accelerator dedicated to underrepresented tech founders. Witness before the US House Financial Services Committee, March 2025, on access to capital beyond Silicon Valley. Named to the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Women in Venture Capital, 2020. Member of NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium; advisory roles with the Cincinnati Innovation District and Endeavor Northwest Arkansas. Contributing author at TechCrunch. Biography Less than one percent of US venture capital goes to Black-led companies. That number has been broadly stable for years, despite every major institutional commitment to change it. The interesting question for senior leaders is no longer whether the gap exists. It is what mechanism actually closes it. Lightship Capital is one of the small number of funds built specifically to answer that question with capital rather than commentary. As General Partner, Candice Matthews Brackeen invests in early-stage companies across consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, sustainability, artificial intelligence and healthcare, with a focus on founders outside coastal networks. She also founded Lightship Foundation, whose accelerator programmes have helped portfolio companies secure more than $100M in follow-on funding. Before Lightship she co-founded Hillman Accelerator in 2016, the first Midwest programme dedicated to underrepresented tech founders, and Hello Parent, a school-safety app that became a national partner of the Brady Campaign. She has since acquired Black Tech Week and moved it to Cincinnati, anchoring it next to Fortune 500 corporate partners including Kroger and Procter and Gamble. Her authority on this subject is institutional, not rhetorical. The Wall Street Journal named her one of the Top 10 Women in Venture Capital in 2020. In March 2025 she testified before the US House Financial Services Committee on expanding capital access beyond Silicon Valley. She also serves on NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium and writes for TechCrunch on venture and entrepreneurship. Key speaking topics Venture capital outside Silicon Valley Building inclusive innovation ecosystems Access to capital for underrepresented founders Corporate partnerships with early-stage companies Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Public policy and capital markets Diversity, equity and inclusion in technology Ideal for Chief investment officers, corporate venture leads and innovation heads designing pipelines into underrepresented founder markets Procurement and supplier diversity leaders building substantive routes to minority-led suppliers Boards and CEOs of large corporates with stated commitments on capital, supplier or workforce inclusion Public sector and economic development leaders working on regional innovation strategy Audience outcomes A clearer picture of where credible deal flow from underrepresented founders actually sits and how to access it. A working view of what corporate partnerships with founder communities look like when they generate revenue, not just press. Specific language for boards on why capital access is an economic question, not only an inclusion one. Direct exposure to a working venture model that has produced documented follow-on funding outcomes.

Why organisations work with Carl Frey The 2013 paper Frey co-authored with Michael Osborne – estimating 47% of US jobs at risk from automation – is one of the most cited works in social science of the past two decades, with its methodology adopted by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, the World Bank, and the Bank of England. No comparable speaker in this space brings this level of intellectual provenance to the conversation. His concept of the “technology trap” gives boards a precisely named mechanism for diagnosing their own institutional response to AI: the pattern by which efforts to resist short-term disruption deny organisations the long-term gains that technology makes possible. How Progress Ends (Princeton, 2025) addresses the question now at the top of most board agendas – why do some organisations and nations sustain the capacity to benefit from new technology while others stagnate – and gives senior leaders a durable, historically grounded answer rather than a forecast. His analysis is built on 1,000 years of economic history, not current trend extrapolation. That means the framework he offers survives the next wave of AI announcements rather than becoming obsolete with each new model release. Advisory roles with the G20, OECD, European Commission, and OECD Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence mean he brings regulatory and policy intelligence that most academic speakers lack – organisations understand not just the technology but the governance environment forming around it. Biography highlights Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work, Oxford Internet Institute; Fellow of Mansfield College; Director, Future of Work Programme, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford Co-author of “The Future of Employment” (2013, with Michael Osborne) – one of the most cited social science papers of the past two decades; 20,000+ citations on Google Scholar; methodology adopted by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, the World Bank, and the Bank of England Author of The Technology Trap (Princeton University Press, 2019) – Financial Times Best Books of the Year; winner of the Richard A. Lester Prize for Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labour Economics (Princeton University) Author of How Progress Ends (Princeton University Press, 2025) – shortlisted for the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Award; finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize Advisor to the G20, OECD, European Commission, and United Nations; former member of the OECD Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence and the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Economic Agenda Ranked in the top 0.5% of economists worldwide by IDEAS/RePEC; contributor to the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and The Economist (By Invitation) Biography The paper that put 47% of US jobs at risk of automation – co-authored at Oxford by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in 2013 – reshaped the global policy debate and became one of the most cited works in social science that decade. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors used its methodology. So did the World Bank and the Bank of England. The Economist later described Frey as an “accidental doom-monger”: his own reading of the evidence was considerably more nuanced than the headlines. That nuance became the subject of his first book. The Technology Trap (Princeton, 2019) – Financial Times Best Book of the Year and winner of Princeton’s Richard A. Lester Prize – argued that the real risk of automation is not that work disappears, but that organisations and governments mismanage the transition. Drawing on the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Revolution, Frey named the failure mode precisely: resistance to short-term disruption, he showed, tends to deny access to the long-term gains. His 2025 book How Progress Ends – shortlisted for the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Award – extends the framework to the question now central to board strategy: why do some organisations and nations sustain the capacity to benefit from new technology while others stagnate? Frey’s answer, built from 1,000 years of economic history spanning Song China to the present, identifies the balance between decentralised innovation and the institutional capacity to scale as the deciding factor. As Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at Oxford’s Internet Institute and Director of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, Frey advises the G20, OECD, European Commission, and United Nations. His analysis appears in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Scientific American. IDEAS/RePEC ranks him in the top 0.5% of economists worldwide. Key speaking topics Automation, AI, and labour market transformation The technology trap: historical lessons for the age of AI Why progress stalls – and what organisations and nations can do about it Workforce strategy in an era of technological disruption AI, inequality, and the distribution of economic gains Industrial policy and the geopolitics of technological leadership The economics of innovation: decentralisation, scaling, and competitive advantage Ideal for Boards and C-suite leadership teams navigating AI investment decisions and long-term workforce strategy CHROs and transformation leads developing evidence-based frameworks for workforce planning under conditions of technological disruption Policy and public affairs functions in sectors facing direct automation exposure – financial services, professional services, manufacturing Strategy and scenario planning teams in organisations with significant AI or digital transformation programmes Audience outcomes A historically grounded framework for distinguishing automation that displaces workers from technology that expands what workers can do – and why the difference matters for investment decisions A working understanding of the “technology trap” mechanism: how to identify institutional resistance before it becomes strategically costly Concrete criteria for evaluating workforce and AI investment decisions against historical patterns of disruption, transition, and recovery Insight into the macro-economic and geopolitical conditions shaping AI adoption – including what the US-China competition for technological leadership means for business strategy Sharper language and stronger evidence for board-level conversations about AI, workforce, and long-term competitive positioning

Why organisations work with Cate Trotter A working method, not a trend report. Trotter pairs structured signal analysis with a disciplined experimentation approach that gets innovation off the slide deck and into the P&L. Direct access to live retail signal infrastructure: Insider Trends runs on-the-ground retail safaris in London, New York, Paris and Seoul, used by senior teams at Chanel, Lego, Nike, Hugo Boss and Carrefour. A retail futures lens recognised by the industry’s own gatekeepers: Rethink Retail Top 100 Global Retail Influencer in 2021 and 2022, LinkedIn Top Voice, TechNation 200 Thought Leader. GINI Certified Chief Innovation Officer credentials applied to commercial problems, not abstract innovation theory. Useful for boards that have tired of innovation programmes that do not pay for themselves. Builds the bridge between AI hype and AI deployment that actually saves money, in language operators and finance teams can act on. Biography highlights Founder and Head of Trends, Insider Trends, a London-based retail futures agency operating retail safaris in London, New York, Paris and Seoul. Rethink Retail Top 100 Global Retail Influencer, 2021 and 2022. LinkedIn Top Voice and TechNation 200 Thought Leader. Future 100 Entrepreneur (Striding Out) and StartUp 100 Entrepreneur (Startups). GINI Certified Chief Innovation Officer. Client roster includes Chanel, Lego, Nike, Mercedes, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, Hugo Boss, Galeries Lafayette, Marks & Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover, Carrefour, L’Oreal, Unilever, Google and Meta. Biography Retail leaders rarely lack trend material. The Carrefour COO, the Hugo Boss board, and the senior teams at Chanel and Lego all have access to the same headline reports as everyone else. What they buy from Insider Trends is the layer underneath: the structured reading of signals that have not yet become headlines, and a method for acting on them before competitors do. Cate Trotter founded Insider Trends to close that gap. The firm runs in-person retail safaris in London, New York, Paris and Seoul, used by senior operators to ground strategic decisions in what is actually working on the shop floor and on the screen. Clients include Nike, Mercedes, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, Marks & Spencer and Galeries Lafayette. Her method joins two disciplines that usually sit apart. A structured PESTLE-style reading of non-obvious signals on the front end, and a disciplined experimentation practice on the back end, drawn from her work as a GINI Certified Chief Innovation Officer. The result is innovation that earns its budget, rather than innovation as performance. Recent work focuses on AI deployments that operators can defend on commercial grounds, not on novelty. The industry has noticed. Rethink Retail named her a Top 100 Global Retail Influencer in 2021 and 2022. LinkedIn ranks her as a Top Voice. TechNation listed her among its 200 Thought Leaders. She speaks to audiences of up to 800 across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and frequently advises CEOs, COOs and boards directly, including the General Manager of L’Oreal France and the Chief Operations Officer of Carrefour. Key speaking topics Retail futures and customer experience Innovation as a managed commercial discipline AI deployment in retail and consumer-facing operations Trend signals and structured foresight Disciplined experimentation Digital transformation in retail Customer behaviour and consumer signals Ideal for Retail and consumer goods CEOs, COOs and boards setting innovation and customer experience priorities. Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads under pressure to convert experiments into commercial returns. Chief Marketing and Customer Officers in consumer-facing categories. Leadership offsites at brands rethinking physical and digital retail formats. Audience outcomes A sharper read of the non-obvious signals shaping their category, separated from the noise of trend headlines. A repeatable method for converting trend insight into commercial experiments with measurable returns. Concrete examples of AI use cases in retail that have already paid for themselves. A clearer view of what the world’s best retail operators are actually doing differently. Confidence to retire innovation projects that exist for show and back the ones that move the P&L.

Why organisations work with Charlene Li Her central argument inverts the standard AI conversation: organisations do not need a separate AI strategy – they need AI deployed in service of the strategy already in place. That reframe moves boards from analysis paralysis to sequenced action, in a space where most external voices add complexity rather than remove it. The Disruption Mindset reverses thirty years of received innovation wisdom: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. That distinction changes how leadership teams set strategy and allocate resources, not merely how they talk about change. Winning with AI (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh, Harvard Business School’s inaugural Chief Digital Officer) is grounded in two years of research and 50+ executive interviews, and includes the Six-Quarter Walk planning tool – a practical sequencing instrument designed to be used without external consultants. Her research spans the full arc of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – giving her longitudinal credibility when leadership teams are being asked to make bets on technologies whose business implications are still contested. As the founder of Altimeter Group, a firm built explicitly to compete with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC before being acquired by Prophet, Li has operated as both a researcher and an entrepreneur navigating the disruption she now advises on – a position most AI strategy voices cannot occupy. Biography highlights New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Disruption Mindset, Open Leadership, Groundswell, and Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025, co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh) Founder of Altimeter Group (2008), a research and strategy firm that competed directly with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC; acquired by Prophet in 2015 Former Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting; currently leads Quantum Networks Group Graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude, A.B.) and Harvard Business School (MBA) Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company; Top 50 Leadership Innovators by Inc.; LinkedIn Top 10 Voices on Company Culture (2022) Keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest; regularly cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Reuters; has appeared on 60 Minutes and CNBC Biography The most common failure point in AI transformation is strategic misdiagnosis. Charlene Li’s research – two years of fieldwork and more than 50 executive interviews for Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (2025) – found that organisations treating AI as a strategy in its own right fall behind those that deploy it in service of the strategy they already have. That distinction, between AI as initiative and AI as instrument, is what separates pilot programmes from scaled competitive advantage. The same counterintuitive rigour runs through her earlier body of work. The Disruption Mindset (2019) challenged a core assumption of competitive strategy: disruption does not create growth – growth creates disruption. Companies that make disruption the goal, rather than the outcome of aggressively pursued growth opportunities, build the wrong culture and the wrong metrics. That argument, backed by research, has changed how board-level strategy conversations are framed, not just concluded. Li’s analytical credibility was built at Altimeter Group, the research firm she founded in 2008 as a deliberate competitor to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC – and which was acquired by Prophet in 2015. She subsequently served as Chief Research Officer at PA Consulting before founding Quantum Networks Group. Across those institutions, she has worked with organisations including 14 of the Dow Jones Industrial 30. She holds a Harvard MBA and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, earned magna cum laude. Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and one of Inc.’s Top 50 Leadership Innovators, Li has keynoted the World Economic Forum, TED, and South by Southwest, and is regularly cited by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. What distinguishes her from others working the same ground is the research arc: she has tracked and advised on each major wave of technological disruption – internet, social media, digital transformation, generative AI – from inside analytical and advisory institutions, not from the outside looking in. Key speaking topics AI strategy and competitive deployment Disruptive transformation and growth strategy Leadership in the digital age Future of work and AI’s workforce implications Organisational culture and the disruption mindset Strategic decision-making under technological uncertainty Business model disruption and innovation Ideal for C-suite and board members responsible for AI investment and transformation decisions Chief Digital Officers, Chief AI Officers, and technology transformation leads Strategy and innovation leaders at established organisations facing competitive disruption Senior HR and people leaders managing workforce implications of AI adoption Audience outcomes A clear framework for aligning AI with existing business strategy – rather than building a parallel AI initiative Understanding of why most AI pilot programmes stall and what organisationally moves them into scaled production The Disruption Mindset distinction: why pursuing disruption as a goal is a strategic error, and what to pursue instead Practical tools for sequencing AI investments against business priorities, including the Six-Quarter Walk planning framework A more confident leadership posture for communicating AI strategy internally – to boards, to workforces, and across the organisation

Why organisations work with Charlie Luxton He runs a working practice, Charlie Luxton Design, whose built work includes the Hook Norton Community Land Trust Passivhaus scheme, so his sustainability argument is grounded in projects he has actually delivered, not a consultancy deck. Two decades of mainstream broadcasting on More4, Channel 5, and BBC platforms have trained him to explain embodied carbon, retrofit, and energy performance to non-specialist audiences without losing technical substance. He speaks credibly across the full stack of a property or ESG conversation: design, materials, regulation, occupant behaviour, and cost, which is unusual for a single speaker. He is a comfortable host and awards presenter as well as a keynote voice, so clients running built-environment or sustainability conferences can use him in more than one role across an event. His perspective is practitioner-first: what works on a real site in the UK climate, at a realistic budget, with real trades and supply chains, which senior buyers in property, construction, and corporate real estate recognise as scarce. Biography highlights Director of Charlie Luxton Design, an Oxfordshire architectural practice focused on energy-efficient residential work. BA in Architecture, Oxford Brookes University; MA, Royal College of Art, London. Lead presenter on More4’s Building the Dream and Homes by the Sea, and presenter on Channel 5’s Build a New Life in the Country. Architect for the Hook Norton Community Land Trust, a twelve-home Passivhaus-standard community-led housing scheme. Co-author with Sally Bevan of Restored to Glory (BBC Books, 2005), the book accompanying the BBC restoration series. Has delivered talks through professional bodies including RIBA Gloucestershire on embodied carbon in buildings. Biography The built environment is responsible for a significant share of global carbon emissions, and the gap between pledges and delivered projects is where most organisations are now stuck. Architects who actually build at that intersection, and who can describe the work in plain language, are rare. That is the space Charlie Luxton occupies. He runs Charlie Luxton Design from North Oxfordshire, a practice dedicated to energy-efficient homes that use local materials and respond to local climate. The studio’s work includes the Hook Norton Community Land Trust scheme, twelve Passivhaus-standard homes developed with a community-led trust in the village where the practice is based. It is a concrete example of the low-energy, community-scale housing model the sustainability conversation often describes in the abstract. Alongside the practice, he has spent more than twenty years on UK television, presenting Building the Dream and Homes by the Sea for More4 and Build a New Life in the Country for Channel 5, with earlier credits including BBC Three’s Dreamspaces. That broadcasting background is why organisations book him: he can take a technical topic like embodied carbon or retrofit and hold a general audience without simplifying the substance. He trained at Oxford Brookes and the Royal College of Art and co-authored Restored to Glory with Sally Bevan for BBC Books. For corporate audiences this produces something specific. Real-estate, construction, and ESG conversations often split between policy speakers who have not built anything and technical specialists who cannot hold a room. Luxton bridges the two, which is useful when a leadership team has committed to a sustainability target and now has to make decisions about what they actually build or lease. Key speaking topics Sustainable architecture and low-carbon buildings Embodied carbon and the built environment Retrofit, energy performance, and the existing UK housing stock Passivhaus and community-led housing Design, materials, and local climate The future of construction Property, homes, and how people live Ideal for Property, construction, and real-estate leadership audiences setting net-zero and retrofit strategy ESG, sustainability, and corporate real-estate teams inside large corporates Housing associations, local authorities, and community trusts working on low-carbon housing delivery Built-environment conferences and awards requiring a credible host with technical authority Audience outcomes A clear read on where embodied and operational carbon actually sit in a building project, and which decisions move the number. A practical sense of what Passivhaus, retrofit, and low-energy design look like once built, drawn from delivered UK projects. Confidence to interrogate sustainability claims made by designers, developers, and suppliers in their own supply chain. A more realistic view of cost, trade-offs, and timescales in low-carbon building, as opposed to the brochure version.

Why organisations work with Chip Conley He turned a single boutique hotel into a 50-property group as CEO of Joie de Vivre, then mentored Brian Chesky through Airbnb’s hospitality build-out. Few speakers can speak from inside both an independent operator and a category-defining platform. His Modern Elder thesis gives leadership teams a usable language for intergenerational collaboration at a moment when most companies are still treating age as a liability rather than a capability. He applied Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to corporate strategy in his book Peak and his 2010 TED talk, and the framework still reads as one of the more durable arguments for measuring culture, employee engagement, and customer experience as connected variables. The Modern Elder Academy he founded in 2018 is the only midlife wisdom school running at scale, with over 2,000 alumni and a second campus, which gives him real operating data on how mid-career professionals reset, retrain, and re-enter organisations. He is a New York Times bestselling author and three-time TED speaker, with books published across two decades that track the same throughline: human meaning as the underlying engine of commercial performance. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he built from a single property in 1987 into a portfolio of around 50 boutique hotels. Former Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, mentor to CEO Brian Chesky during the company’s expansion to hosts in 191 countries. Founder and Executive Chairman of Modern Elder Academy, with campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and more than 2,000 alumni. Three-time TED speaker, including “Measuring what makes life worthwhile” (2010) and his 2023 talk on the midlife chrysalis. New York Times bestselling author of Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder and Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, alongside Peak, Emotional Equations, The Rebel Rules, and Marketing That Matters. Stanford BA and MBA. Named Most Innovative CEO in the Bay Area by San Francisco Business Times and recipient of the hospitality industry’s 2012 Pioneer Award. Biography The conventional career arc treats age as a depreciation curve. Chip Conley has spent two decades arguing the opposite, and building the institutions to prove it. He founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality in San Francisco in 1987, ran it for nearly 24 years, and grew it into one of California’s largest boutique hotel groups, around 50 properties at its peak. The book that came out of that period, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, applied Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to employee, customer, and investor relationships, and remains the most cited articulation of his commercial argument that human meaning is the engine, not the decoration, of business performance. In 2013, Airbnb’s three founders asked him to become Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. He mentored Brian Chesky and helped translate a tech platform into a hospitality company operating with hosts in 191 countries. The label he picked up there, “modern elder”, became the seed of his next institution. The Modern Elder Academy, which he founded in 2018, has campuses in Baja California Sur and Santa Fe and has now run more than 2,000 mid-career professionals through structured programmes on transition, longevity, and the social contract between generations at work. His more recent books, Wisdom@Work and Learning to Love Midlife, push that thesis into the corporate agenda directly: age as a category of workforce diversity, midlife as a strategic asset, and the intergenerational team as a more accurate model of how organisations actually learn. The argument is grounded in operating experience, not commentary, which is why boards and executive teams increasingly book him to challenge the assumptions inside their own talent strategy. Key speaking topics The multigenerational workplace and the case for age as workforce diversity Modern Elder leadership and the redesign of mid-career Culture and employee engagement built on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Disruptive innovation in hospitality and platform businesses Customer experience as a function of internal culture Emotional intelligence in leadership Midlife transition, longevity, and workforce retention Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers redesigning talent strategy across five generations at work CEOs and boards facing attrition of senior expertise and weak intergenerational knowledge transfer Hospitality, travel, and consumer-facing leadership teams rebuilding culture as a commercial asset Executive development and leadership academy programmes focused on mid-career renewal and senior transition Audience outcomes A clearer operating definition of intergenerational collaboration, with concrete language for treating age as a diversity and capability question A reframed view of mid-career and senior employees as a strategic asset rather than a cost line A working model, drawn from Peak and Maslow, for connecting employee meaning, customer experience, and financial performance Specific, named examples from Joie de Vivre, Airbnb, and Modern Elder Academy that translate into practical policy and culture changes A more honest conversation inside the leadership team about ageism, longevity, and what wisdom is actually worth in commercial terms

Why organisations work with Chris Baréz-Brown Twenty-five years working the commercial creativity brief as an operator, first agency-side and then running his own firm. The view is from inside the work, not from a research perch. Five Penguin titles set out a coherent published thesis on creativity as a learnable behaviour, so buyers can read the argument before booking the room. His Unilever programme was written up in Harvard Business Review, a rare credential in this territory. He ships a behaviour-change tool with the keynote. TiO and the Elvis Energy Lab let the room run the method the next morning, not just remember the speech. A repeat-booking record on the brand side that other creativity speakers don’t match. Biography highlights Founder of Upping Your Elvis, a creativity and energy consultancy working with global brands. Former director at innovation consultancy ?What If!, leading offices in London, New York and Sydney. Author of five Penguin books: Shine, Wake Up!, Free!, How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas, and Upping Your Elvis. Penguin’s bestselling author in 2014. Creator of TiO, a workplace mental wellbeing app with research from the University of Bristol. Featured in Harvard Business Review for the impact of his work with Unilever. Media appearances include the BBC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Fast Company and Calm. Biography Most creativity programmes inside large organisations fail at the same point. The room leaves energised, the workstreams revert, and within a quarter the operating model has absorbed the change. The problem is rarely a shortage of ideas. It is the absence of a daily practice that lets ordinary employees produce original work under commercial pressure. This is the territory Chris Baréz-Brown has worked in for twenty-five years. He spent over a decade as a director at ?What If!, the innovation consultancy, running the business across London, New York and Sydney before founding Upping Your Elvis in 2010. The premise of the firm is that human energy, not strategy decks, is the variable that determines whether a creative culture survives contact with the operating model. His five Penguin titles, including the bestseller Upping Your Elvis, set out a body of practice that treats creativity as a learnable behaviour rather than a personality trait. The work has run inside Nike, Coca-Cola, Diageo, Unilever, Roche, Microsoft and the WPP agency network on the brand side, with Harvard Business Review featuring the impact of the Unilever programme. What sets the offer apart from a standard creativity keynote is the post-event mechanism. Through TiO, an app developed with research from the University of Bristol, and the Elvis Energy Lab, audiences leave with a method they can run themselves. The thesis underneath all of it is commercial: brave thinking is a function of human state, and human state can be designed for. Key speaking topics Commercial creativity and innovation practice Energy management and human performance at work Mental and emotional wellbeing in high-pressure roles Leadership of creative teams Behaviour change and habit design inside organisations Brand-side innovation case studies Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders looking to lift creative output across marketing organisations Heads of innovation and R&D in consumer-facing businesses Senior HR and people leaders responsible for engagement and wellbeing strategy Leadership offsites where the brief is renewal of energy and creative confidence, not a strategy refresh Audience outcomes A working definition of creativity as daily practice, not occasional inspiration Specific behavioural tools, including TiO, that audiences can use the next morning A sharper read on how their own energy state is shaping the quality of their commercial decisions Case material on what holds up when a creative culture meets the operating model

Why organisations work with Chris Barton He built a product under conditions that proved his point: no smartphones, no app stores, no viable algorithm, and a consensus view from MIT and Stanford that the problem was unsolvable. Shazam survived six years of near-bankruptcy before the App Store arrived. That timeline is the argument, not a metaphor for it. His two named frameworks – «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» – give innovation leads something to work with after the event: a method for stripping assumptions back to first principles, and a model for distinguishing productive persistence from sunk-cost thinking. His role building Android’s carrier distribution infrastructure at Google, and leading mobile carrier partnerships at Dropbox, means his perspective on how transformative products actually reach scale is drawn from the operational history of three category-defining companies. He holds 12 patents across Shazam, Google, and Dropbox – including one employed in the Google Search algorithm – and testified as a key DOJ witness in the Google antitrust trial on the mobile default deals he personally negotiated. That depth of institutional involvement in the mobile computing era is not a speaker credential; it is a primary source. Guard Inc., his current startup applying AI to drowning detection in swimming pools, is a live demonstration that his frameworks are not retrospective lessons from one successful exit – he is still using them on a problem that experts regard as unsolved. Biography highlights Co-founder and first CEO of Shazam; the company was acquired by Apple in 2018 for a reported $400 million and has been downloaded more than 2 billion times First business development employee at Google focused on mobile partnerships; led the carrier agreements with Verizon and AT&T that established Android’s distribution infrastructure One of the first 100 employees at Dropbox, heading mobile carrier partnerships Holds 12 patents across Shazam, Google, and Dropbox, including one employed in the Google Search algorithm BA Economics and MBA, UC Berkeley; Master in Finance, University of Cambridge; early career at L.E.K. Consulting Key witness for the U.S. Department of Justice in the United States v. Google LLC antitrust trial (2023), testifying on mobile search default agreements he personally negotiated Founder and CEO of Guard Inc., an AI startup building drowning detection technology for swimming pools Biography Most organisations treat innovation as a culture question. Chris Barton treats it as a methods problem. As co-founder and first CEO of Shazam – the music recognition app Apple acquired in 2018 for a reported $400 million – he built a category that did not exist, under conditions that should have made it impossible. When Barton conceived the idea in 1999, there were no smartphones, no app stores, and no algorithm capable of identifying music from ambient audio. Professors at MIT and Stanford told him the pattern recognition problem could not be solved. Shazam launched commercially in 2002 and survived six years of near-bankruptcy before the App Store created its distribution opportunity. It reached 300 million monthly active users before Apple acquired it. The timeline matters: this is not a story about a fast breakthrough. It is a story about sustained method under prolonged failure. His track record inside the companies that built mobile computing adds a different layer of authority. At Google he was the first business development employee focused on mobile, leading the carrier agreements with Verizon and AT&T that established Android’s distribution infrastructure. At Dropbox he was one of the first 100 employees, heading mobile carrier partnerships. He holds 12 patents across all three companies, including one used in the Google Search algorithm, and in 2023 testified as a key DOJ witness in the United States v. Google LLC antitrust trial – speaking to the mobile default deals he personally negotiated. His frameworks – «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» – extract a repeatable method from that experience: how to strip assumptions back to first principles, and how to sustain focus on core insight when resistance is at its strongest. He applies both now as founder and CEO of Guard Inc., an AI startup building drowning detection technology for swimming pools – a problem, again, that multiple experts have called unsolvable. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and startup creation Innovation under expert and institutional resistance Consumer AI and the origins of mobile technology Friction elimination and product simplicity Creative Persistence as an organisational method Technology and business model disruption Assumption-stripping and first-principles thinking Ideal for Senior leadership and innovation teams at large organisations launching new products or business units against internal or expert resistance Chief Digital Officers, CTOs, and heads of innovation building internal capability for breakthrough thinking Entrepreneurial organisations and scale-up leadership navigating prolonged uncertainty Conference audiences of founders, technology executives, and business leaders in high-disruption sectors Audience outcomes A working understanding of the «Start from Zero» and «Creative Persistence» frameworks, and how to apply them when pursuing ideas facing expert or institutional opposition A concrete model for distinguishing productive persistence from sunk-cost thinking – drawn from six years of near-bankruptcy at Shazam before the product reached scale Specific techniques for identifying and eliminating friction – the unnecessary effort that prevents otherwise viable ideas from reaching users A revised understanding of how transformative consumer products (Shazam, Android, Dropbox) were built from first principles, not from incremental improvement Greater organisational confidence in pursuing ideas that current consensus dismisses

Why organisations work with Chris Boardman Demonstrable experience building high-performing teams in three distinct environments: elite sport (the British Cycling R&D team known as the «Secret Squirrel Club»), commercial business (Boardman Bikes), and UK national infrastructure (Active Travel England). The pattern transfers. Most speakers only have one of these on the CV. Genuine authority on driving innovation inside institutions that are structurally set up to resist it. His work on the Bee Network in Greater Manchester, alongside Mayor Andy Burnham, is a case study in pushing something new through a political and administrative system built for continuity. Credibility with senior leaders who are tired of generic «marginal gains» content. Boardman was inside the team that produced the phrase and can explain what the method actually looked like on the ground at British Cycling, without the subsequent mythology. A personal story of reinvention that holds a senior room’s attention: carpenter, Olympic champion, product entrepreneur, commissioner of a £2 billion government agency, with the same discipline around preparation running through each phase. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist, Barcelona 1992 (4km individual pursuit); first British cycling gold in 72 years. World Hour Record holder on two separate occasions; three times wore the yellow jersey at the Tour de France; three-time World Champion. CBE (2022) for services to transport; MBE (1992) for services to cycling. Led the R&D group within British Cycling known as the «Secret Squirrel Club»; co-founded Boardman Bikes with Alan Ingarfield and Sarah Mooney. National Active Travel Commissioner for England and Chair of Sport England, with oversight responsibility for billions of pounds of public investment in active travel and sport. Author of «Triumphs and Turbulence» (Cross Sports Cycling Book of the Year, 2017); BBC and ITV cycling commentator, including London 2012 Olympic coverage. Biography Britain had not won an Olympic cycling gold in seventy-two years. In 1992, at Barcelona, a former carpenter from the Wirral crossed the line first on a Lotus frame. Chris Boardman’s name has been tied to technology-led performance ever since. Two decades later, that fascination with preparation had been institutionalised. As head of research and development at British Cycling, Boardman led the small team that became known inside the sport as the Secret Squirrel Club. Its remit was to find every unglamorous, repeatable improvement a well-prepared squad could stack on top of raw talent. The approach underwrote Team GB’s dominance at Beijing 2008 and London 2012. The phrase «marginal gains» was, in practice, its house style. The same method has since travelled further than most sporting careers ever do. Alongside Mayor Andy Burnham, Boardman designed the Bee Network as Greater Manchester’s first Cycling and Walking Commissioner: an 1,800-mile, £1.5 billion plan to rewire how a city region moves. From 2022 he has led Active Travel England, the national executive agency responsible for the standard of walking and cycling infrastructure across the country. He chairs Sport England in parallel. What makes him useful in a senior boardroom is the translation. Most speakers have built one high-performing team, in one context. Boardman has done it three times: inside an elite sporting federation, inside a consumer bike business he co-founded, and inside a government agency running a £2 billion programme. The common thread is stamina: how you keep a team intact and productive long enough to deliver something the surrounding system quietly prefers not to change. Key speaking topics High-performance team building Innovation culture in complex institutions Change leadership and organisational resistance Marginal gains and operational excellence Leading large-scale public delivery Personal reinvention and career translation Ideal for CEOs and senior leaders responsible for major transformation programmes Public sector, transport, and infrastructure leaders delivering long-duration projects Innovation, strategy, and transformation directors inside risk-averse institutions Audience outcomes A sharper view of what it takes to build a team capable of sustained high performance, drawn from inside British Cycling’s Olympic programme. A working understanding of why innovation usually fails inside institutions, with examples from both elite sport and UK public policy. Specific examples of moving large organisations from strategy to delivery, drawn from the Bee Network and Active Travel England. A direct, practical account of managing one’s own career through repeated reinvention.

Why organisations work with Chris Gledhill He has worked both sides of the fintech competitive line: inside Lloyds Banking Group’s disruptive innovation function, then co-founding the UK challenger bank Secco as its CEO. Audiences get an advisor fluent in incumbent constraints and start-up economics. His Secco thesis, that customer data and reputation can function as forms of banked value, pushed the UK challenger debate past interface and pricing into a harder conversation about what banks actually sell. He is a consistent top-tier voice in credible fintech influencer indices, including Onalytica’s Fintech Top 100, where he has ranked as high as third, and the CityAM Fintech Powerlist. He contributed to The FinTech Book (Wiley, edited by Susanne Chishti), the first crowdsourced reference work in the field. His chapter on the future evolution of money beyond cryptocurrency is part of the core literature. Biography highlights Former innovation technologist and lead mobile architect within Lloyds Banking Group’s Digital Innovation and Payments team, part of the bank’s disruptive innovation function Co-founder and former CEO of Secco, a pre-licence UK challenger bank built around customer ownership of money, data and reputation Contributor to The FinTech Book (Wiley), edited by Susanne Chishti of FINTECH Circle Author of “Consumerization: The Enterprise Guide to BYOD” Ranked #3 in Onalytica’s Top 100 Fintech Influencers and a recurring feature in CityAM’s Fintech Powerlist TEDx speaker and long-running commentator on fintech and digital banking Biography Most retail banks are not structured to reinvent themselves. They are built to run their current model efficiently, which is a different problem. The result is a sector that uses the language of transformation while iterating on the same product shelf. Chris Gledhill has argued the opposite case from both sides of the line. Inside Lloyds Banking Group’s Digital Innovation and Payments team, he worked as a lead mobile architect and innovation technologist within what the bank called its disruptive innovation lab. He then co-founded Secco, a pre-licence UK challenger bank, and became its CEO. Secco’s proposition went further than most. Where other UK challengers matched the incumbents on product and improved the interface, Secco proposed that a bank could hold data and reputation alongside money, with the customer owning and controlling both. Gledhill set out the fuller argument in The FinTech Book (Wiley), edited by Susanne Chishti. His chapter asks what money becomes once value itself can be both social and programmable. He is a consistent feature in credible fintech indices, including Onalytica’s Top 100 Fintech Influencers, where he has ranked as high as third, and the CityAM Fintech Powerlist. For boards and strategy teams, that recognition reflects a decade of specific public arguments carried into industry discourse. Key speaking topics Fintech and the future of financial services Digital banking and challenger bank strategy Emerging technology in banking: AI, blockchain, biometrics Digital identity and customer data ownership Innovation inside incumbent financial institutions Open banking and the API economy Ideal for Banking and financial services leadership teams confronting digital-native competitors Heads of digital and innovation inside incumbent financial institutions Fintech and payments industry conferences and strategy offsites Financial services boards setting strategy through a period of technology-led disintermediation Audience outcomes A sharper strategic map of where digital banking is heading and what that means for incumbent business models First-hand perspective on the full-stack challenger bank thesis, including what Secco actually tried to build and why Better questions to take back to boards about customer data ownership and digital identity Informed judgement on which emerging technologies are genuine strategic levers for banks and which are features chasing problems

Why organisations work with Chris Griffiths He brings a named, tested method. GRASP and the Solution Finder process, published across The Creative Thinking Handbook and GRASP The Solution, give teams a four-step route from problem to decision that can be run again without him in the room. He has built the tooling, not just the theory. OpenGenius turned the mind mapping method into Ayoa, a commercial platform used across Pfizer, the NHS, the European Commission and the State Bank of India, which gives his frameworks an operating record outside the keynote. He treats neurodiversity as a creative asset. Through the Inspire Genius Foundation and Ayoa’s neuroinclusive design, he connects creative thinking to the way neurodivergent minds actually work, giving leaders a practical angle on inclusion that is tied to output rather than compliance. He has run the playbook at scale. With Tony Buzan he built a global network of more than 1,000 licensed instructors operating inside Sony, the Ministry of Defence and the NHS, which is unusual evidence that his method transfers beyond the author. His work has been stress-tested in serious rooms. He facilitated a Nobel Laureate brainstorm at the Petra Nobel Conference convened by HM King Abdullah II of Jordan, and has coached senior teams at the European Commission. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of OpenGenius, the company behind the Ayoa mind mapping and productivity platform. Author of The Creative Thinking Handbook (Kogan Page), GRASP The Solution, and Mind Maps for Business (with Tony Buzan), with titles translated across more than 15 countries. Co-creator, with Tony Buzan, of the ThinkBuzan Licensed Instructor Course, a global network of more than 1,000 accredited mind mapping instructors. Founder of start-ups that have ranked in the Deloitte European Fast 50 and The Sunday Times Fast Track 100. Facilitator of a brainstorming session with Nobel Laureates at the Petra Nobel Conference, hosted by HM King Abdullah II of Jordan. Contributor and cited expert in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, BBC, The Telegraph and GQ. Biography Creativity inside most organisations is still treated as a talent rather than a process. Chris Griffiths has spent nearly three decades arguing the opposite, and building the books, frameworks and software to prove it. His published work sets out a specific method. The Creative Thinking Handbook, published by Kogan Page and now available in more than ten languages, lays out the Solution Finder model. GRASP The Solution distils a four-step process that teams can run on any live business problem. Mind Maps for Business, co-authored with Tony Buzan, remains a standard text on applied visual thinking. The frameworks have a commercial track record attached. As founder and CEO of OpenGenius, he turned the method into Ayoa, a mind mapping and productivity platform used inside Pfizer, the NHS, the European Commission and the State Bank of India. With Tony Buzan he built the ThinkBuzan Licensed Instructor Course into a network of over 1,000 accredited instructors operating inside Sony, the Ministry of Defence and the NHS, a rare piece of evidence that the method works without the author in the room. His businesses have ranked in the Deloitte European Fast 50 and The Sunday Times Fast Track 100. He has facilitated a Nobel Laureate brainstorm convened by HM King Abdullah II of Jordan at the Petra Nobel Conference, and through the Inspire Genius Foundation he funds young neurodivergent entrepreneurs, the group Ayoa’s neuroinclusive design was built around. Key speaking topics Applied creative thinking in business Systematic innovation and problem solving Mind mapping for leadership and strategy AI as a creative partner for human teams Productivity and focus for knowledge workers Neuroinclusive approaches to innovation Entrepreneurship and venture building Ideal for CEOs, founders and senior leadership teams who want a shared method for problem solving across the executive group. Chief Innovation Officers, Heads of Strategy and transformation leads tasked with making innovation repeatable rather than episodic. L&D and People leaders building creative-thinking capability and neuroinclusive practice across the workforce. R&D, product and commercial teams preparing for a specific planning cycle, offsite or innovation sprint. Audience outcomes A named four-step process (GRASP) that leaders can apply to a live business problem the day after the session. A working grasp of the Solution Finder model from The Creative Thinking Handbook and how to run it with a team. A practical introduction to mind mapping as a decision tool, not a sticky-note exercise. A view of where AI fits alongside human creativity, drawn from the design choices inside Ayoa. A clearer read on how neurodivergent thinkers contribute to creative output and how to design sessions that use that.