Innovation und Disruption

Why organisations work with Glen Weyl He is the working bridge between three of the people who matter most in this debate: Vitalik Buterin on Ethereum and Web3, Jaron Lanier on AI and data, and Audrey Tang on civic technology. Senior teams get one room with the network, not three separate conversations. He co-invented Quadratic Voting and Quadratic Funding, mechanisms now used inside crypto ecosystems, civic budgets, and corporate innovation funds. Boards looking at participatory capital allocation are looking at his work, often without knowing it. He led Microsoft’s Office of the CTO work on the OpenAI relationship and now runs Microsoft Research’s Plural Technology Collaboratory. He has seen the inside of how the largest AI partnership in the world is governed, and can talk about it candidly. His book Radical Markets, written with University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, was named an Economist Book of the Year in 2018 and changed how serious economists discuss property, voting, and antitrust in a digital economy. He works in the same language as policymakers in Taiwan, the EU, and the US Treasury, which makes him unusually useful to organisations whose AI exposure is also a regulatory exposure. Biography highlights Founder and Research Lead, Plural Technology Collaboratory, Microsoft Research. Former Political Economist and Social Technologist, Microsoft Office of the CTO, including the leadership team for the OpenAI relationship. Co-author, Radical Markets, Princeton University Press, 2018; an Economist Book of the Year. Co-author with Audrey Tang of Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy, 2024. Founder, RadicalxChange Foundation; co-founder and chair, Plurality Institute; co-founder, Harvard GETTING-Plurality Research Network. Named by CoinDesk, WIRED, and Bloomberg Businessweek on their respective lists of most influential people in technology, 2018. Biography Most institutions designed for the industrial economy do not have a good answer to generative AI. Voting systems, ownership rules, antitrust law, and corporate governance were all written for a world where the most powerful entities in a room were human. Glen Weyl’s career has been a sustained attempt to redesign those institutions for a world where they are not. His 2018 book with Eric Posner, Radical Markets, was an Economist Book of the Year and forced a new conversation about property, voting, and antitrust inside serious policy circles. Out of that work came Quadratic Voting and, with Vitalik Buterin, Quadratic Funding. Both are now in operational use in civic budgets and Web3 ecosystems, including projects funded by Ethereum. At Microsoft, he sat inside the Office of the CTO during the period when the company’s relationship with OpenAI became one of the most consequential commercial arrangements in technology. He now runs the Plural Technology Collaboratory, Microsoft Research’s special project on how democratic societies function under generative AI, working with Taiwan’s Audrey Tang, with Harvard, and with civil society groups including the Collective Intelligence Project. His 2024 book with Tang, Plurality, was written openly on GitHub and translated by volunteers into more than a dozen languages, an unusual proof point that the governance ideas in it actually work in practice. For a board trying to decide what AI legitimacy means inside its own organisation, that record makes him one of the few people in the world worth bringing into the room. Key speaking topics Generative AI and democratic institutions Plurality and collaborative technology Quadratic Voting and Quadratic Funding Web3, decentralised identity, and digital ownership Antitrust and platform competition Data as labour and the economics of AI training Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting AI governance and partnership strategy Government, regulator, and central bank audiences on AI and digital policy CTOs and Chief AI Officers working on legitimacy and deployment frameworks Foundations, philanthropic capital allocators, and corporate venture funds rethinking how they fund collective goods Audience outcomes A clearer view of how AI partnerships at the scale of Microsoft and OpenAI are actually governed. A working vocabulary for Quadratic Voting, Quadratic Funding, and Plurality, with concrete examples of where each is operating. A sharper sense of where current antitrust, data, and AI regulation is heading in the US, EU, and Asia. Specific design ideas for participatory decision-making inside large organisations, not generic engagement theory.

Why organisations work with Gordon Hewitt Direct intellectual lineage from C.K. Prahalad at Michigan Ross, applied for two decades to live board agendas at Pfizer, IBM, AstraZeneca, HSBC, Sony, and Deutsche Post/DHL. A working method that treats strategy as a thinking system for senior teams, not a planning cycle, so boards leave with sharper questions about value creation, not a deck. Demonstrated range across pharma, financial services, consumer goods, telecoms, and logistics, which lets him connect cross-industry disruption patterns most sector specialists miss. CBE for services to management and international business, plus Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, signal a level of institutional credibility boards trust at chair and CEO level. A genuine practitioner-academic: still teaching at Michigan Ross and Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School while advising sitting CEOs. Biography highlights CBE for services to management and international business, 2007 New Year Honours. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Visiting Distinguished Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Professor of Strategy Practice, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. Distinguished Professor of Corporate Strategy, Duke Corporate Education. Long collaboration with the late C.K. Prahalad on corporate value-creation, innovation, and strategic transformation. Advised CEOs and boards at Pfizer, IBM, AstraZeneca, Philips, Sony, Honeywell, PwC, Verizon, Ericsson, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Time Warner, PepsiCo, Syngenta, Biocon, and Deutsche Post/DHL. Biography Most strategy frameworks assume the rules of the industry hold still long enough for a plan to play out. They no longer do. The companies that struggle are often the ones that ran the previous playbook best. Gordon Hewitt has spent two decades helping senior leaders work in that more unstable terrain. At the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, he formed a long partnership with the late C.K. Prahalad, working at the front edge of thinking on corporate value-creation, innovation, and strategic transformation in what they described as a game-changing world. That body of work continues to anchor how he talks to boards. The list of organisations he has advised reads like a cross-industry map of where disruption hits hardest: Pfizer and AstraZeneca in pharma, IBM and Verizon in technology, HSBC and Credit Suisse in financial services, Sony, PepsiCo, and Time Warner in consumer-facing businesses, Deutsche Post/DHL in logistics. He chairs CEO and chairman peer groups in Europe and the United States on the future of corporate strategy and governance. He was awarded a CBE in 2007 for services to management and international business, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He continues to hold appointments at Michigan Ross, Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School, and Duke Corporate Education, which is unusual for a working board advisor and is one of the reasons CEOs treat him as a serious thinking partner rather than a speaker. Key speaking topics Strategy under industry disruption Corporate value creation in complex markets Innovation as a discipline Strategic transformation in incumbent businesses Strategic collaboration and ecosystem strategy Overcoming industry and organisational orthodoxies The CEO and board agenda in a game-changing world Ideal for CEOs, boards, and executive committees of incumbent businesses facing rule-changing competition. CSOs, heads of strategy, and transformation leads. Pharma, financial services, telecoms, consumer goods, and logistics leadership teams contending with cross-industry disruption. Senior leadership development programmes that want a serious strategy voice rather than a motivational one. Audience outcomes A sharper account of how value is created and lost when industry rules are being rewritten. A working language for separating planning from strategic thinking inside their own executive team. Cross-sector patterns of disruption they can test against their own market. A clearer view of where current orthodoxies inside their organisation are quietly working against them. Specific provocations for the next board strategy conversation, not generic frameworks.

Why organisations work with Graeme Codrington The TIDES framework (Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values) gives leadership teams a named, structured lens for distinguishing structural disruption from short-term noise, something generic trend-watching rarely provides. His research on generational dynamics, anchored in Mind the Gap (Penguin), is one of the most analytically grounded treatments of multigenerational workforce tension available to leadership teams: it goes beyond labelling generations to explaining the mechanisms that drive the differences. Keynote insight does not stop at the room door: through TomorrowToday Global, organisations can move directly from a session to structured consulting and implementation, which means the analysis has a clear pathway to operational change. He is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: in South Africa and the UK/Ireland – an independently verified measure of sustained content quality across different professional and cultural contexts. His Seven Grey Elephants model and antifragility framework give boards a structured vocabulary for confronting the major forces that most organisations acknowledge but rarely analyse with discipline. Biography highlights Co-founder and lead futurist, TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm operating across 150-plus countries Author of multiple Penguin bestsellers, including Mind the Gap (with Sue Grant-Marshall) and Leading in a Changing World (with Keith Coats) Guest lecturer at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science Only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: Southern Africa and UK/Ireland (Professional Speaking Association Award of Excellence) Global Certified Speaking Professional, Global Speakers Federation; Fellow and Honorary Fellow, Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland TEDx Top Picks 2021; speaks to approximately 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries Biography Graeme Codrington has spent over two decades arguing that most organisations are solving the wrong problem. The disruptions they face are not technical challenges requiring better execution, they are adaptive challenges requiring entirely new thinking. His co-founded firm TomorrowToday Global was built around that distinction, and around helping organisations act on it. Codrington is co-founder and lead futurist of TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm tracking the disruptive forces shaping organisations since the early 2000s. His TIDES model maps five forces: Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values that drive disruption across any sector. His book Mind the Gap, published by Penguin, applied this thinking to generational dynamics and became a widely used text in leadership development programmes internationally. He lectures at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and speaks to roughly 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries. His frameworks have expanded to include the Seven Grey Elephants (a structured analysis of the major forces leaders tend to acknowledge but avoid confronting directly) and an antifragility model that helps organisations move beyond resilience to building systems that actually strengthen under pressure. Codrington is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame, in South Africa and the UK. He holds the Global Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Global Speakers Federation and is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland. For organisations wanting to move beyond a single session, TomorrowToday Global’s consulting team provides structured follow-through from keynote insight to practical implementation. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futurist methodology Future of work and workforce transformation Multigenerational leadership and generational dynamics Adaptive leadership in disruptive environments Organisational antifragility and resilience Innovation culture and next practice approaches The TIDES framework and disruptive forces mapping Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders building adaptive strategy for permanent disruption CHROs and people leaders managing multigenerational workforce complexity Transformation leads and strategy teams moving beyond traditional planning horizons Executive development programmes at business schools and corporate leadership academies Audience outcomes A working understanding of the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and practical tools for identifying which they are facing Familiarity with the TIDES framework for mapping the disruptive forces most relevant to their sector and strategic context Concrete methods for scanning the business environment for weak signals and translating them into actionable strategy Clarity on what the future of work means for their organisation’s people strategy, including multigenerational dynamics and AI integration A framework for building antifragility into their team or organisation, moving beyond survival-mode resilience

Why organisations work with Greg Williams His forthcoming book Code, Capital, Power (2027) is the spine of his current work: how big technology companies have redefined markets, reshaped global order and bent society to their design. The keynote is the boardroom version of that argument. Sixteen years at WIRED, including close to a decade as Editor-in-Chief of the UK edition, gave him access most writers on this beat do not get. Satya Nadella, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Albert Bourla, Prime Ministers Blair, May and Johnson have all sat across from him. That access feeds directly into how he frames emerging signals for boards. He is cofounder of The Venture Group, an AI-first business operating as a founder accelerator programme. That adds an operator’s vantage point to the journalist’s depth he built at WIRED. Four-time British Society of Magazine Editors Editor of the Year for Science and Technology, and Chair of Judges for The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2026. Both are independent external markers that his judgement on this beat is taken seriously by people who track it closely. He works equally well as keynote, interviewer and on-stage moderator, which matters when the programme needs him to hold a room with a head of state, a founder and a regulator on the same panel. McKinsey and BCG have used him to host private leadership formats for this reason. Biography highlights Former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED UK and Deputy Global Editorial Director, WIRED, after sixteen years at the title; cofounder of The Venture Group, an AI-first business operating as a founder accelerator programme. Author of the forthcoming Code, Capital, Power: How Big Tech Companies Redefined Markets, Reshaped Global Order and Are Transforming Society in Their Image (2027). Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2026. British Society of Magazine Editors Editor of the Year, Science and Technology, in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2024. On-stage interviewer of Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Albert Bourla and Prime Ministers Blair, May and Johnson. Speaking credits include the World Economic Forum in Davos, UN AI for Good, Cannes Lions, Web Summit, Vivatech, SXSW, DLD, Founders Forum and the World Governments Summit, plus private leadership formats for McKinsey and BCG. Biography The most consequential question for senior leadership over the next decade is no longer whether technology will reshape markets. It is who is doing the reshaping, who is benefiting, and what kind of operating environment that leaves for everyone else. The argument Greg Williams sets out in his forthcoming book Code, Capital, Power is that big technology companies have already redrawn the rules of markets, capital and global order, and that boards now have to lead inside that new geometry. That work draws on sixteen years at WIRED, where he ran the UK edition for close to a decade and held the role of Deputy Global Editorial Director, with editorial responsibility for teams from Mexico to Japan. He is also cofounder of The Venture Group, an AI-first business operating as a founder accelerator programme. Access compounds the credibility. Williams has interviewed Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Albert Bourla and Prime Ministers Blair, May and Johnson, on stage and in print. He has shared programmes with the World Economic Forum in Davos, UN AI for Good, Cannes Lions, Web Summit, Vivatech, SXSW and the World Governments Summit, and has hosted private leadership formats for McKinsey and BCG. The British Society of Magazine Editors named him Editor of the Year for Science and Technology four times, in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2024, and the Orwell Foundation appointed him Chair of Judges for its 2026 Prize for Journalism, on a panel with Nick Davies, Meenakshi Ravi and Sayeeda Warsi. For a leadership team, the booking works on two levels. As keynote, he translates AI, cybersecurity and the platform economics shaping global order into decisions a board can act on. As interviewer or moderator, he can hold a complicated panel, ask the sharper question, and keep the conversation honest when a founder, a regulator and a customer are on the same stage. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and its impact on business models Cybersecurity and digital risk at board level Technology and geopolitics Innovation and disruption Future of work and workforce transformation Strategic foresight and trend forecasting Leadership in a technology-driven economy Ideal for Boards and executive committees setting AI, data or cybersecurity strategy CEO and CIO offsites that need a credible outside read on the technology agenda Innovation, strategy and transformation leads briefing their organisation on what is coming Industry conferences that need a moderator who can interview founders, regulators and policymakers on the same stage Audience outcomes A sharper filter for separating real technology signal from hype A clearer view of the AI, cybersecurity and platform shifts that will hit their sector next A forward read on the technology economy shaped by his own argument that a small number of big tech companies are restructuring markets and the global order, not a vendor pitch Specific named companies, researchers and regulators to watch Better questions to put to their own technology and strategy teams on return

Why organisations work with Guy Hoffman He runs one of the leading labs in the world on human-robot and human-AI collaboration, so the content is drawn from active research, not recycled commentary. His design training at Parsons sits on top of an MIT computer science doctorate, which is why his work on non-anthropomorphic robots and nonverbal machine communication reads as rigorous rather than aesthetic. His TEDxJaffa talk “Robots with Soul” passed three million views and remains one of the most-watched public explanations of why machines feel awkward to work with, and how to fix it. He has shipped work that reached wide audiences: the AUR robotic desk lamp won the IEEE Robot Design Competition, and his collaboration on the Digital Water Pavilion was named a TIME Best Invention of the Year. He speaks to leadership audiences about AI without the two failure modes buyers dread: pure hype on one side, and pure academic detachment on the other. Biography highlights Associate Professor and Mills Family Faculty Fellow, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University. Heads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship (HRC2) group at Cornell. PhD, MIT Media Lab (human-robot interaction); MSc Computer Science, Tel Aviv University; animation studies, Parsons School of Design. Best Paper awards at HRI and robotics conferences across 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Co-author of “Social Robot Morphology: Cultural Histories of Robot Design” in Cultural Robotics (Springer, 2023). Work covered by CNN, BBC, The New York Times, PBS, NBC, IEEE Spectrum and Semafor. Biography The hard problem in applied AI is not the model. It is the hand-off. The moment a machine has to time its action to a human’s, read context, share a task, or back off when the person wants to lead, most systems fail in ways that erode trust faster than any single output error. Guy Hoffman has spent two decades building the science of that moment. At Cornell, Hoffman leads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship group as Associate Professor and Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The lab’s work sits across mechanical engineering, computer science and information science, which is why it produces research on timing, nonverbal communication and the design of machines that do not pretend to be human. His doctorate is from the MIT Media Lab; he also trained in animation at Parsons, and that combination shapes the questions he asks. The public version of that thinking is his TEDxJaffa talk “Robots with Soul,” watched more than three million times and still one of the clearest explanations of why so many AI products feel wrong to use. The academic version is a body of work that has been recognised with Best Paper awards at HRI and robotics conferences across a decade and more, and a 2023 Springer chapter, “Social Robot Morphology,” that traces how cultural assumptions get baked into machine design. For senior audiences, the through-line is practical. Companies are now deploying AI into workflows that were built for humans. Hoffman’s research shows what breaks at that boundary, why it breaks, and what good looks like when a machine is designed to collaborate rather than merely perform. That is a more specific brief than the usual AI keynote, and it lands with operators who have already moved past the demo. Key speaking topics Human-AI collaboration and the design of productive machine partners Human-robot interaction in workplaces and homes Nonverbal communication between people and intelligent systems Non-anthropomorphic robot and AI design Timing, trust and hand-offs in human-machine teams Cultural assumptions embedded in AI and robot design The future of robots in care, service and creative work Ideal for Chief technology and chief AI officers leading enterprise AI deployment Heads of R and D, innovation and product in technology-intensive sectors Boards and executive teams setting strategy for automation and AI-enabled services Health, manufacturing and service leaders introducing robotic or AI systems into human workflows Audience outcomes A clearer map of where AI and robotic systems tend to fail at the human boundary, and why those failures are predictable A working vocabulary for discussing trust, timing and hand-offs in AI-enabled operations Specific design principles from two decades of human-robot interaction research, translated for non-technical leaders A view of where near-term robotics is heading in workplaces, homes and care settings, grounded in current lab work Sharper questions to bring back to internal AI and automation roadmaps

Why organisations work with Hal Gregersen A specific, teachable method for recasting strategic problems: the four-minute “Question Burst,” published in Harvard Business Review and used inside organisations from Disney/Pixar to Patagonia. Co-author of “The Innovator’s DNA” with Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, the foundational research identifying the five behaviours, including questioning, that separate disruptive innovators from ordinary executives. A perspective shaped by 200-plus structured interviews with catalytic questioners, including founders and CEOs, plus a behavioural database of more than 25,000 leaders. MIT Sloan and former MIT Leadership Center director credentials that give his frameworks weight in C-suite and board settings, not just innovation labs. Ranked on the Thinkers50 list across five cycles, peaking at #16, and winner of the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for Leadership. Biography highlights Senior Lecturer in Work and Organization Studies, MIT Sloan School of Management. Former Executive Director, MIT Leadership Center. Co-author of “The Innovator’s DNA” (Harvard Business Review Press) and author of “Questions Are the Answer” (Harper Business, 2018). 2017 Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award for Leadership; ranked Thinkers50 #16 in 2019. Senior Fellow at Innosight; co-founder of the Innovator’s DNA consulting group. Previous faculty roles at INSEAD, London Business School, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and Aalto University. Biography The most consequential strategic mistakes rarely come from missing data. They come from accepting a flawed framing of the problem. The leaders who break that pattern share a behavioural habit, asking catalytic questions, that can be researched, isolated, and taught. That argument runs through twenty years of work at MIT Sloan, where Hal Gregersen serves as Senior Lecturer in Work and Organization Studies and previously led the MIT Leadership Center. With Clayton Christensen and Jeff Dyer, he co-authored “The Innovator’s DNA,” the research project that identified the five discovery skills, including questioning, observing, and experimenting, that separate disruptive innovators from competent operators. His subsequent book, “Questions Are the Answer,” drew on more than 200 interviews to formalise the practice. Out of that work came the “Question Burst,” a four-minute structured method published in Harvard Business Review’s “Better Brainstorming” and now used inside organisations from Disney/Pixar to Patagonia to reframe stuck problems before solutions are debated. The Thinkers50 ranking, peaking at #16 globally in 2019, and the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award for Leadership reflect what senior teams actually take from his sessions: a transferable discipline for changing the questions in the room before changing the strategy. Key speaking topics Inquiry-driven leadership The Innovator’s DNA and the five discovery skills The Question Burst methodology Building cultures of constructive questioning Disruptive innovation as a leadership behaviour AI and the future of catalytic inquiry Leading through transitions Ideal for CEOs and senior executive teams setting strategy under deep uncertainty. Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and transformation leads building innovation capability beyond pilot programmes. Boards and leadership development programmes seeking a research-grounded behavioural framework rather than a values statement. Audience outcomes A working command of the Question Burst method, applied live to a real organisational problem. The five Innovator’s DNA behaviours mapped onto the audience’s own roles, with a clear view of where they default to answering rather than questioning. A diagnostic for spotting the questions a leadership team is currently avoiding, and the strategic cost of that avoidance. Concrete language for embedding catalytic questioning into operating rhythms, board reviews, and innovation portfolios.

Why organisations work with Hamish Taylor Operator authority across three unrelated industries at CEO level: aviation brand at British Airways, cross-border rail at Eurostar, and retail banking at Sainsbury’s Bank, all reached before he turned 40. A specific innovation method, not a generic call to think differently. The “Masterthief” approach pairs a defined business problem with an unrelated sector that has already solved a structurally similar problem, then translates the mechanism back. Concrete cross-sector transfers he can talk through end to end: yacht interior designers brought into British Airways cabin design, Disney queue management applied to airport experience, rugby refereeing brought into banking risk and compliance. Senior advisory standing that matches the room. Chairs the EMEA advisory board for Emory University, Non-Executive Director of Chartered Brands, Trustee of the Robert T Jones scholarship, and recipient of Emory’s Sheth Distinguished International Alumnus Award. Works the full audience range, from board and CEO level to frontline operating staff, with the same material translated for each layer rather than a single fixed deck. Biography highlights Former CEO of Eurostar Group, having joined as Managing Director of Eurostar (UK) Ltd in 1997 with a remit to reverse heavy losses. Former CEO of Sainsbury’s Bank, the joint venture between J Sainsbury plc and the Bank of Scotland. Former Head of Brand Management at British Airways, responsible for First, Club World, Club Europe, Concorde and Shuttle, including the introduction of flat beds. Rail Professional Business Manager of the Year, 1998, for results at Eurostar. Sheth Distinguished International Alumnus Award, Emory University; Chair of Emory’s EMEA advisory board. Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Transport. Biography Eurostar was three years old and losing money heavily when Hamish Taylor took over as Managing Director of the UK business in 1997. Within two years he was running the Eurostar Group across the UK, France and Belgium, and had been named Rail Professional Business Manager of the Year. At 36, he had already been Head of Brand Management at British Airways, where the relaunch of Club World, Club Europe and First Class included the introduction of flat beds. By the end of 1999 he had moved again, this time to run Sainsbury’s Bank as CEO, the joint venture between J Sainsbury and the Bank of Scotland. Three industries, three CEO-level remits, all before he turned 40. The pattern across them was the same: an organisation that had stopped looking outside its own sector for answers, and a customer proposition that had drifted from what the customer actually valued. That pattern is the basis of his current work. The Inspired Leaders Network titled him “Masterthief” for the way he runs innovation as a translation exercise. Yacht interior designers helped redesign aircraft cabins. Disney’s queue management informed airport experience. Rugby refereeing logic was applied to banking risk and compliance. Each transfer was a structural match between a problem and a sector that had already solved something equivalent. Today he advises corporations and governments on innovation, customer focus and people leadership, chairs the EMEA advisory board for Emory University, sits as a Non-Executive Director of Chartered Brands, and is a Trustee of the Robert T Jones memorial scholarship. Emory has recognised the work with its Sheth Distinguished International Alumnus Award. Key speaking topics Cross-sector innovation and idea transfer Customer-led business transformation Brand strategy and customer proposition design Leadership of organisational change Service innovation in regulated industries Growth strategy after a turnaround Ideal for CEOs and executive committees rebuilding a customer proposition after a structural shift in their market CMOs, brand and customer experience leaders translating strategy into operating reality Innovation, transformation and strategy leads who need a working method, not a culture talk Boards in regulated sectors looking for an external operator’s view on customer and growth Audience outcomes A specific technique for sourcing innovation from outside the sector, with worked examples from aviation, rail and banking. A clearer view of where their organisation’s customer proposition has drifted from the customer’s actual definition of value. Concrete language to describe the difference between sector benchmarking and structural problem matching. Reference cases from BA, Eurostar and Sainsbury’s Bank that translate into their own context rather than sit as anecdotes.

Why organisations work with Harmeen Mehta She has run digital and AI transformation as an operator inside three of the world’s largest technology and telecoms incumbents (Equinix, BT Group, Bharti Airtel), not as an external advisor. She has built and scaled new digital businesses, including Airtel Payments Bank and Airtel’s cloud and security units, giving her credibility on revenue creation, not only cost out. Her board work at Lloyds Banking Group, including the IT and Cyber Advisory Forum, gives her direct line of sight on how non-executive directors expect technology risk and AI governance to be discussed. Recipient of the 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award and the TM Forum Global CIO of the Year, both peer-judged on execution. Biography highlights Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Equinix (from April 2025). Former Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, BT Group (March 2021 to September 2024). Former Global CIO and CEO of Cloud and Security Business, Bharti Airtel (seven years). Earlier CIO positions at BBVA, HSBC, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Independent Non-Executive Director, Lloyds Banking Group; Vice-Chair and Board member, TM Forum. 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award; TM Forum Global CIO of the Year; Women Economic Forum “Woman of the Decade in Innovation and Leadership.” Biography The gap between AI pilot and AI in production is where most enterprise value is currently lost. Boards want commercial outcomes; CIOs are still cleaning up legacy estate. Mehta has spent the last decade operating exactly in that gap, and her career arc is unusual because she has done it across three sectors. At Bharti Airtel, as Global CIO and head of the cloud and security business, she launched Airtel Payments Bank and built standalone cloud and security units serving hundreds of millions of customers. This is operating P&L experience, not advisory work. At BT Group, as the first Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, she ran a Group-wide programme that simplified a complex IT estate, scaled digital channels, and put AI into production across customer operations. Earlier CIO roles at BBVA, HSBC, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch gave her grounding in regulated environments, where governance, cyber risk, and resilience are not afterthoughts. That perspective now feeds her board work at Lloyds Banking Group, where she sits on the IT and Cyber Advisory Forum, and at TM Forum, where she is Vice-Chair and chairs the Appointments and Governance Committee. In April 2025 she joined Equinix as Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, reporting to CEO Adaire Fox-Martin. The 2018 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award and the TM Forum Global CIO of the Year recognise the same thing the boards she serves on do: she is judged on what she ships, not what she proposes. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence and operational deployment Digital transformation in complex incumbents Cybersecurity and technology risk at board level Data strategy and the commercial value of data Cloud, platforms, and modern engineering operating models Women in technology and senior STEM leadership Building new digital businesses inside large groups Ideal for Boards and audit, risk, and technology committees commissioning conversations on AI governance and cyber resilience. CEOs, CIOs, CDOs, and transformation leads moving AI from pilot to production. Telecoms, financial services, and digital infrastructure leadership teams confronting legacy estate and platform redesign. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI investment converts to commercial value and where it stalls. An operator’s perspective on what good AI governance looks like inside a regulated, board-supervised business. A practical read on how digital channels and platforms produce revenue, not only cost reduction. Sharper questions to ask the executive team about AI, cyber, and data risk.

Why organisations work with Harold Hughes He has built a venture-backed company on blockchain infrastructure, raised more than four million dollars, and survived past the cohort year that kills most peers. The lessons are operating lessons, not theory. His Catalyst Labs curriculum has been adopted by Benedict College, the University of Texas, and Furman University, which means his programme has been pressure-tested by institutions that do not run on hype. He has a published book, A Kids Book About Blockchain, that translates Web3 into language a non-technical audience can act on. Few speakers in this space can do that without losing the substance. He is one of the few operators who has both written about social capital and used it to raise capital from inside underrepresented networks. Senior buyers get an inclusion conversation grounded in revenue, not rhetoric. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Bandwagon, a venture-backed live-experience identity and analytics company applying blockchain to ticketing and fan data Founder of NFNTE Capital and co-founder of Catalyst Labs, a 12-week accelerator for emerging founders Author, A Kids Book About Blockchain, published by A Kids Co. and distributed by Penguin Random House Inaugural cohort, IBM Blockchain Accelerator; finalist in the Smart Dubai Office Global Blockchain Challenge BA in Economics and Political Science and MBA, Clemson University; named to Clemson’s «Roaring 10» young alumni list Angel investor with a portfolio that includes Partake Foods, Liquid Death, Athletic Greens, and Broadway productions including Stereophonic and Hell’s Kitchen Biography Bandwagon began with a simple operating problem in live entertainment. Teams and venues knew almost nothing about the people sitting in their seats, and ticket fraud was eating into the relationship. Harold Hughes built a venture-backed company that uses blockchain infrastructure to give organisers verifiable identity and analytics. Bandwagon has raised more than four million dollars from investors including Backstage Capital and the State of South Carolina, was part of the inaugural IBM Blockchain Accelerator, and acquired Seattle-based IdealSeat in 2020. The work outside Bandwagon is what gives Hughes range. As founder of NFNTE Capital and co-founder of Catalyst Labs, he runs a twelve-week accelerator for emerging entrepreneurs whose curriculum has been adopted by Benedict College, the University of Texas, and Furman University. He wrote A Kids Book About Blockchain, published by A Kids Co. and distributed by Penguin Random House, because he saw that most explanation of Web3 had been written for people who already understood it. Hughes is a serious angel investor as well as an operator. His portfolio includes Partake Foods, Liquid Death, Athletic Greens, and Broadway productions such as Stereophonic and Hell’s Kitchen. The thesis behind that activity, and behind his programmes, is that social capital is a measurable input into commercial outcomes, and that founders from under-represented backgrounds have been systematically priced out of it. That is the point he made before the diversity conversation hardened, and it is the point he can still make commercially. He holds a bachelor’s in Economics and Political Science and an MBA from Clemson University, where he was named to the «Roaring 10» young alumni list in 2019. The credentials are useful context. The argument he brings to a senior audience is that early-stage discipline, operating clarity about new technology, and access to networks are the same problem, and the people who solve all three are the ones who scale. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and scale-up discipline Blockchain and Web3 in the enterprise Social capital as a commercial asset Diversity in venture and founder access to capital Customer identity and data in live experience Future of technology in consumer industries Ideal for Founders, CEOs, and leadership teams of growth-stage companies looking to build durable advantage from technology and network strategy Corporate innovation, brand, and partnership leaders working with sport, music, and live-experience platforms Diversity, talent, and people leaders who want a substantive operator voice on under-represented founder economics Universities, accelerators, and entrepreneurship programmes designing curricula for first-generation and emerging founders Audience outcomes A working understanding of how blockchain creates verifiable identity and ownership in consumer settings, beyond cryptocurrency A specific method for mapping personal and organisational networks as commercial inputs, taken from the Catalyst Labs and NFNTE programmes A frank account of what it took to raise capital and survive as a Black founder in venture markets, with implications for corporate inclusion strategy A scale-up operator’s view of the decisions that separate companies that get funded from those that get acquired or close

Why organisations work with Harvey Goldsmith He has produced two of the largest broadcast events in history, Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 in 2005, and can speak first-hand to how they were assembled, funded and delivered. He built the UK’s leading concert promotion business from a student club in Brighton to a company working with most of the major global artists of the past five decades. He continues to start and chair new ventures, including the British Music Experience museum, the OnBlackheath Festival and Hans Zimmer’s first live concert tour, so the material is current rather than retrospective. His CBE, Music Industry Trust Award and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres are recognition from named bodies that he treats live performance as a serious commercial and cultural discipline. Biography highlights CBE for services to the entertainment industry, 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Co-organiser of Live Aid (1985) with Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, raising approximately £140 million. Worldwide producer of Live 8 (2005), with 225 artists across multiple international locations. Producer of the Led Zeppelin reunion at the O2 Arena (2007) in tribute to Ahmet Ertegun. Chairman of the British Music Experience, the UK’s museum of popular music. Music Industry Trust Award (2006); Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (2006); Freedom of the City of London (2011). Biography Live Aid was assembled in roughly ten weeks. Two stadiums, a global satellite broadcast and an artist roster that had never been gathered before, with no precedent for the funding model, the rights model or the production model. The producer who solved those problems alongside Bob Geldof was Harvey Goldsmith. That work is the most visible expression of a longer story. Goldsmith began promoting concerts as a pharmacy student in Brighton in the 1960s, founded Artiste Management Productions in 1973 and Harvey Goldsmith Entertainments in 1976, and built the leading UK concert promotion business of the era. Across that period he worked with the artists who defined modern live music, including Bruce Springsteen, Queen, The Who, Paul McCartney and Luciano Pavarotti. The pattern of the work is entrepreneurial rather than custodial. Live 8 in 2005 used the Live Aid model and rebuilt it for a different media environment. The Led Zeppelin reunion at the O2 in 2007 was a single-night production at the scale of a tour. He produced Hans Zimmer’s first live concerts in 2014 and turned them into a European touring property, and he founded the OnBlackheath Festival the same year. He continues to chair the British Music Experience and to invest in and advise newer ventures across experiential marketing and immersive entertainment. The CBE, the Music Industry Trust Award and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres are the formal markers. The substantive credential is a sixty-year track record of starting things, financing them, and getting them on stage on the date promised. Key speaking topics Live event production at global scale Entrepreneurship across long careers Building creative businesses The economics of live music and broadcast Leadership under hard deadlines Charitable and philanthropic event delivery Ideal for CEOs and founders responsible for ventures with fixed launch dates Marketing and brand leaders building experiential platforms Boards and investors evaluating creative and entertainment businesses Audiences in the events, media, music and live entertainment industries Audience outcomes A first-hand account of how Live Aid and Live 8 were actually built, financed and delivered. A working view of how an entrepreneur sustains a creative business across five decades and multiple media cycles. Specific lessons in negotiating with talent, broadcasters and sponsors when the date will not move. A grounded perspective on what philanthropy looks like when it has to clear its costs and reach an audience.

Why organisations work with Hatem Salem Operating perspective from running an integrated communication group across Cairo and Paris since 1991, including Media Hatem Salem, Brands & Branding, Act CSR, and Global Arabian Network. Few speakers on AI in marketing have built and led the full agency stack themselves. Practical fluency in MENA consumer markets that most Western marketing speakers do not have, useful for organisations looking at brand entry, expansion, or partner work across the Arab world. Track record of building owned platforms, including Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference, and the Blue Star Award. Useful for clients thinking about brand events as a channel, not a line item. Multiple Agency of the Year awards from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter, including for the Smart Village and Sharm El Sheikh public service campaigns. Concrete agency credibility, not a personal-brand claim. Current focus on neuromarketing and AI in advertising creativity gives buyers a speaker who can connect behavioural science, generative tools and brand strategy in the same talk, rather than picking one lens. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO, Hatem Salem Communication Group; founder of Media Hatem Salem (1991), Brands & Branding (2000), Act CSR (2010), and Global Arabian Network (2014). Founder and President of Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference, and the Blue Star Award. Multiple Agency of the Year awards from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter and from the American University in Cairo. BA in Mass Communication, Cairo University; MA in Mass Communication, Press, Publicity, New Media and Cinema Science, Stendhal Grenoble 3. Former journalist and press correspondent in Paris covering European and Middle Eastern media for over five years. Has taught media, marketing, branding and advertising at Cairo University, the French University in Egypt, the British University in Egypt and the University of Grenoble. Biography The marketing function is being rebuilt twice over. AI is reshaping how creative, media and customer experience are produced, and the audience side has changed too, with attention more fragmented and brand loyalty thinner than at any point in the past two decades. Most organisations are still reasoning about this as a set of tool choices, when the real question is which parts of the marketing operation hold their shape and which get redesigned. Salem has been running marketing and communication businesses through every prior wave of this shift. He founded Media Hatem Salem in Cairo in 1991, then built out an integrated group with Brands & Branding, Act CSR, and the Global Arabian Network, working across above the line, below the line and through the line channels for clients across Egypt and the wider Arab market. The group has earned multiple Agency of the Year honours from the International Advertising Association Egypt Chapter, including for the Smart Village and Sharm El Sheikh campaigns. Alongside the agency work, he has built owned brand platforms that operate as commercial assets in their own right. Cairo Fashion Week, Cairo Mobile Film Festival, Egypt CSR Day, the International Branding Conference and the Blue Star Award all sit inside the group, giving him a working view of brand events as a channel rather than a marketing line item. Earlier in his career he worked as a Paris-based press correspondent covering European and Middle Eastern media, and held research and teaching posts at Stendhal Grenoble 3, Cairo University, the French University in Egypt, and the British University in Egypt. His current work focuses on neuromarketing, AI in advertising creativity, AI in event management, and the future of media, cinema and social platforms. The connecting thread is operational: how generative tools, behavioural science and experience design change what marketing teams actually produce, and what stays human. Key speaking topics Neuromarketing and consumer behaviour AI in advertising and creative production AI in marketing and customer experience Brand strategy in MENA and emerging markets Event platforms as brand assets The future of media, cinema and social platforms Corporate social responsibility and brand reputation Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams rebuilding the marketing operating model around AI. Boards and executive teams of consumer brands entering or scaling in MENA and the Arab market. Heads of communications, customer experience and creative agencies working through generative AI integration. Event, sponsorship and brand partnership leads rethinking the role of owned platforms. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which parts of the marketing operation are most exposed to AI redesign, and which parts hold. Working examples of neuromarketing and behavioural science applied to brand, advertising and event work. A practitioner read on the MENA market that most Western marketing voices cannot provide. A more concrete sense of how owned brand platforms function as a commercial channel. Sharper questions for CMOs and agency partners on AI in creative production, personalisation and customer experience.

Why organisations work with Dr Helena Boschi She brings neuroscience into the room with the credibility of someone who has sat on the executive side of HR. Senior roles at Shire Pharmaceuticals and Serono SA mean she speaks to leadership problems from inside, not from a lab. Her book Why We Do What We Do (Wiley, 2020) gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for why people behave as they do under pressure, which lasts beyond the event. She works at the intersection of chronic stress and cognitive performance, an area most leadership speakers skim and few treat as a board-level risk. She is a member of the British Psychological Society and has built Chequered Leopard Ltd since 2004 specifically to translate peer-reviewed research into operational practice, not keynote theatre. She is unusually sharp on the behavioural cost of hybrid working: trust erosion, risk attitudes, attention, empathy. Useful for any leadership team still making assumptions about what remote does to a workforce. Biography highlights Founder of Chequered Leopard Ltd (since 2004), a consultancy applying neuroscience to leadership, change and workplace behaviour. Author of Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Our Brain to Get the Best Out of Ourselves and Others (Wiley, 2020). Former Vice President of Talent Management at Shire Pharmaceuticals. Former Corporate Director and Head of Global Organisation Development at Serono SA (now part of Merck KGaA). Member of the British Psychological Society. Research interests include the impact of chronic, work-induced stress on cognitive ability in the workplace. Biography Most change programmes fail on the same fault line. Leaders model behaviour as a matter of willingness, when the brain is actually running on threat detection, bias and habit. Helena Boschi has built a twenty-year practice around closing that gap, translating applied neuroscience into the decisions senior teams actually have to make. Her consultancy, Chequered Leopard Ltd, was founded in 2004 after senior corporate roles inside Shire Pharmaceuticals, where she was Vice President of Talent Management, and Serono SA, where she led global organisation development. That sequence matters. She is not a researcher who later discovered business. She ran the people function at scale in listed multinationals and turned to neuroscience because the tools available to her were not explaining what she was seeing. Her book Why We Do What We Do, published by Wiley in 2020, sets out how the brain communicates, remembers, attends, leads and decides, and what organisations can do to stop working against it. The work that sits beneath it, including her interest in chronic work-induced stress and cognitive function, informs keynotes on change, cognitive bias, psychological safety, hybrid working and innovation. She is a member of the British Psychological Society. The argument she leaves in the room is specific. Most of what organisations call a culture problem is a biology problem being asked to behave. Once leaders see that, the interventions change. Key speaking topics Applied neuroscience at work The neuroscience of change Cognitive bias and decision-making Psychological safety and fear at work Trust, risk and hybrid working The neuroscience of innovation Chronic stress and cognitive performance Neuroplasticity and cognitive agility in an AI-driven world Ideal for CEOs, executive teams and boards working through sustained change or transformation programmes. CHROs, CPOs and senior HR, talent and organisation development leaders. Leadership development and learning teams designing programmes for senior cohorts. Cross-cultural and international leadership groups operating in hybrid conditions. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of why people resist, withdraw or underperform during change, grounded in how the brain responds to uncertainty. Named cognitive biases leaders can spot in their own decisions and in the decisions their teams make for them. A practical read on what hybrid working is doing to trust, empathy and risk appetite inside their organisation. Specific behavioural levers for psychological safety, rather than slogans. Language and evidence leaders can take back into their own teams without needing to cite academic research.