Emprendimiento speakers

Why organisations work with Henry Chesbrough He is the named author of the framework that most corporate innovation functions claim to use. When a board wants the original argument rather than a consultant’s summary, they bring him in. Two decades of field research inside Procter & Gamble, Intel, IBM, GE, Bayer, and Huawei give him specific evidence on where open innovation pays off and where it quietly fails. His work extends beyond R&D into business models and services, which is where most open innovation programmes stall once the easy wins run out. He sits at the centre of the academic and practitioner networks that define the field, including the Garwood Center at Berkeley Haas and the Open Innovation Community he founded. Recognition from Thinkers50 (ranked four times), the Industrial Research Institute’s Medal of Achievement, and the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award establishes standing with both academic and corporate audiences. Biography highlights Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation at Luiss University, Rome. Author of “Open Innovation” (HBS Press, 2003), “Open Business Models” (2006), “Open Services Innovation” (2011), and “Open Innovation Results” (Oxford University Press, 2020). Named to the Thinkers50 ranking four times and shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2011. Recipient of the Industrial Research Institute’s Medal of Achievement (2017), the Herbert Simon Award (2020), and the Academy of Management Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award (2022). Honorary doctorates from Hasselt University, the University of Vic, and Eindhoven University of Technology. Biography “Open innovation” is the most widely adopted idea in corporate R&D of the last twenty years, and Henry Chesbrough is the person who named it. His 2003 book set out a simple claim that changed how firms think about invention: no organisation, however well resourced, can rely only on its own labs. The better question is how to combine internal and external ideas, and how to build a business model that captures value from both. That argument has held up through two decades of field research. Chesbrough’s work inside Procter & Gamble, Intel, IBM, GE, Bayer, and Huawei is the evidence base behind “Open Innovation Results” (Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines why many open innovation programmes stall and what separates the firms that generate measurable returns from the ones that merely adopt the vocabulary. His institutional base is the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he is Faculty Director. He is also Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation at Luiss University in Rome, and previously held a chair at ESADE in Barcelona. Before academia he spent over a decade in Silicon Valley’s disk drive industry, finishing as Vice President of Marketing at Quantum’s Plus Development subsidiary. Recognition has followed the field’s maturity. Thinkers50 has named him to its ranking four times, the Industrial Research Institute awarded him its Medal of Achievement in 2017, and the Academy of Management gave him its Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award in 2022. For senior leaders rebuilding an innovation function, Chesbrough brings both the original thesis and the accumulated evidence of what happens when it meets a real P&L. Key speaking topics Open innovation Business model innovation Corporate R&D strategy Ecosystems and external partnerships for innovation Services innovation Technology commercialisation Intellectual property strategy Ideal for CEOs and CTOs responsible for corporate R&D and innovation portfolios Chief Strategy Officers rebuilding the firm’s approach to external partnerships and ecosystems Heads of corporate venturing, open innovation, and new business building Boards and executive teams reviewing the economics of internal versus external innovation sourcing Audience outcomes A clear grasp of what open innovation actually requires beyond the label, from the person who defined it. Named examples of where the model has produced measurable results and where large firms have wasted effort. A sharper view of how business models, not just technology pipelines, determine returns on innovation spend. Language and frameworks that help executive teams align on what “open” means for their specific sector.

Why organisations work with Holly Tucker She built a marketplace that gave more than 5,000 independent businesses a commercial route they could not otherwise access, and can speak directly to what scaled that community and what broke it. Her second act, Holly and Co, is a certified B Corp built around purpose-led small business advice, giving her a live view of what founders are wrestling with now, not a decade ago. As host of Conversations of Inspiration, she has interviewed several hundred founders in long form, which makes her one of the few speakers in the UK with a continuously refreshed sense of what early-stage builders are learning. Her MBE and appointment as a UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador give her credibility on the policy side of small business, not only the operator side. She translates founder thinking into language corporate audiences can use: retail teams, marketing teams and transformation teams leave with a sharper sense of what independent brands do that scale players do not. Biography highlights Co-founder of notonthehighstreet.com (2006), the UK marketplace for independent makers. Founder of Holly and Co (2017), a certified B Corporation supporting small businesses. MBE, 2013, for services to small businesses. UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador for creative small businesses, 2015. Author of Do What You Love, Love What You Do (Virgin Books, 2021), a Sunday Times bestseller; earlier titles with Simon and Schuster. Presenter of ITV’s Be Your Own Boss and host of the Conversations of Inspiration podcast. Biography Notonthehighstreet.com began as a frustration with nowhere to sell handmade Christmas wreaths. Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish turned that frustration into the UK’s defining marketplace for independent brands, and over thirteen years it gave more than five thousand small businesses a route to customers they would not otherwise have reached. That is the operator credential Tucker brings into a room. Holly and Co, founded in 2017 and a certified B Corporation since 2022, is where the second chapter sits. It is a platform, a shop and an advice engine for independent founders, and it is the evidence base for most of what Tucker says publicly about small business. The weekly Conversations of Inspiration podcast now runs into the hundreds of episodes, which gives her a continuously updated read on what founders are actually doing, not what commentators think they are doing. Her public role has extended beyond business. An MBE in 2013 for services to small businesses, and appointment as a UK Prime Minister’s Business Ambassador in 2015, placed her inside the conversation about how policy shapes independent enterprise. Three books, including Sunday Times bestseller Do What You Love, Love What You Do, turned that experience into written form for founders at earlier stages. Where Tucker is most useful to a corporate audience is on the question larger companies rarely answer well: what exactly do independent brands do that scale players find hard to replicate, and how should a big business think about that when it partners with them, buys from them, or tries to build its own version. She speaks to that from both sides of the relationship. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and the founder mindset Building and scaling marketplaces Independent retail and the creative economy Purpose-led business and B Corp practice Small business advocacy and policy Female founders and enterprise Brand, storytelling and community for consumer businesses Ideal for Retail, consumer and marketplace leadership teams thinking about independent brand partnerships. Marketing and brand leaders who want a grounded view of what small and founder-led brands do that larger ones cannot. Conferences and internal events focused on entrepreneurship, purpose-led growth or the creative economy. Female founder communities and enterprise networks within larger organisations. Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what independent founders actually do differently, drawn from a marketplace of more than five thousand small businesses. A practical read on what purpose-led and B Corp businesses look like in operation, not in theory. Fresh founder stories from a podcast library that now spans several hundred interviews. Language for corporate teams to use when they talk about supporting, partnering with or learning from small businesses. A sharper sense of how policy, platform and community interact in the creative economy.

Why organisations work with Howard Schultz He is one of the only major executives to have led a full crisis turnaround at the same global company twice. That longitudinal experience produces a very different quality of insight than a single transformation story. His 2011 number-one New York Times bestseller “Onward” presents a specific and testable argument: recovering a business means restoring what people came for, not restructuring around it. Within three years of his 2008 return to Starbucks, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low. His case for employee investment is built on commercial evidence, not values rhetoric. Starbucks under Schultz was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare to part-time workers and to offer equity participation to hourly employees. He presents attrition, service quality, and customer loyalty as the direct outputs. Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time’s “Time 200” most influential people, he holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson – providing academic validation of a practical executive record. As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he brings pattern recognition on consumer brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story. Biography highlights Chairman and CEO of Starbucks across three leadership periods (1986-2000, 2008-2017, 2022-2023), growing the company from 11 stores to 28,000 locations across 77 countries Took Starbucks public in 1992; oversaw nearly $100 billion added to the company’s market capitalisation between 2008 and 2017 Author of four books including “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul” (2011), a number-one New York Times bestseller Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011; included in Time magazine’s “Time 200” most influential people Ethics and leadership awards from Columbia Business School (Botwinick Prize), Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business (Hesburgh Award), and UCLA Anderson (John Wooden Global Leadership Award) Co-founder of Maveron (1998), a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management and early investments including eBay and Zulily Biography The most destructive leadership decisions at scale are rarely made during crises. They accumulate during the growth years, when speed and efficiency gradually crowd out the cultural foundations that made a business worth building. Howard Schultz experienced this from the inside, as the architect of Starbucks’ global expansion and the executive who had to reverse the damage when it became visible. His 2008 return as CEO is documented in “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul,” a number-one New York Times bestseller. The argument at the centre of the book is precise: the path back to financial health ran directly through culture, not around it. Employee retraining, the restoration of the in-store experience, and a deliberate recalibration of what Starbucks stood for came before the financial metrics recovered. Within three years of his return, the stock had risen more than five times from its crisis low. His approach to employees follows the same logic. Starbucks under his leadership was among the first U.S. companies to extend healthcare benefits to part-time workers, and it offered equity participation to hourly employees through a programme called Bean Stock. Schultz presented these not as social obligations but as commercial decisions: loyalty, retention, and service quality are measurable outputs of how people are treated, not side effects of good intentions. Named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year in 2011 and included in Time magazine’s “Time 200,” Schultz holds ethics recognition from Columbia Business School, Notre Dame’s Mendoza College, and UCLA Anderson. As co-founder of Maveron, a consumer-focused venture capital firm with $1.3 billion in assets under management, he has extended this analysis of brand durability well beyond the Starbucks story. His perspective reaches audiences navigating growth, crisis recovery, and the sustained tension between operational efficiency and cultural health. Key speaking topics Values-based leadership at scale Crisis leadership and organisational recovery Brand culture and long-term commercial performance Global consumer brand strategy Employee investment as competitive strategy Entrepreneurship and growth Corporate responsibility and business ethics Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams navigating rapid scaling decisions or organisational turnaround Chief People Officers and HR leadership examining employee value proposition at scale Brand, marketing, and commercial leadership in consumer-facing organisations Boards and senior leaders weighing cultural priorities against short-term commercial pressure Audience outcomes A tested framework for treating culture and commercial performance as mutually reinforcing, not competing priorities Concrete, sequenced lessons from a live turnaround at global scale – what decisions were made, in what order, and why A reframe of employee investment from a cost line to a commercial variable with traceable outcomes Perspective on how a brand’s identity is preserved or eroded through the decisions made at pace and scale Practical insight into leading across multiple organisational phases, including growth, institutional crisis, and recovery

Why organisations work with Ida Kymmer Brings a working knowledge of how the same technologies are deployed in commercial, defence, and peacebuilding contexts, so leaders see the full surface area of a decision rather than one face of it. Founder of House of PeaceTech, the ecosystem platform connecting investors, startups, governments, and NGOs working on conflict prevention and recovery technology, which gives clients access to a network most strategy advisors cannot reach. Has shaped immersive technology programmes for BMW, H&M, Clinique, and Shiseido during her tenure at Journee, so the perspective is built on real brand deployment, not theory. Active across MENA, Korea, and the Nordics through Infinite Reality, Hub71, and Vinnova, giving organisations a read on emerging technology adoption beyond the usual US and Western European frame. Publishes Tech for War and Peace weekly, so the analysis a client receives is built from continuous primary research, not refreshed every booking cycle. Biography highlights Director of Business, MENA at Infinite Reality Founder of House of PeaceTech, the ecosystem platform for technology in conflict prevention and recovery Former Director of Global Affairs at Journee, working with BMW, H&M, Clinique, and Shiseido Author of Tech for War and Peace, a weekly newsletter on defence, conflict, and peacebuilding technology Master of Arts in Peace and Conflict Studies Startup judge for Vinnova (Sweden) and Hub71 (Abu Dhabi); speaking record at World Economic Forum, SXSW, Gitex, TechBBQ, and Deloitte Innovation Day Biography Emerging technology rarely arrives with a clean use case. The same systems that power immersive retail can be repurposed for surveillance, defence, or disinformation. Most advisors look at one face of that surface. Few look at all of them. Ida Kymmer’s work sits across the commercial, defence, and peacebuilding applications of the same technologies. She holds a Master of Arts in Peace and Conflict Studies and founded House of PeaceTech, an ecosystem platform connecting investors, startups, governments, and NGOs working on conflict prevention and recovery. Her weekly newsletter, Tech for War and Peace, tracks how defence-adjacent technologies move between sectors. Her commercial credibility is built on deployment, not theory. As Director of Global Affairs at Journee from 2021 to 2023, she shaped immersive technology programmes for BMW, H&M, Clinique, and Shiseido. She now serves as Director of Business, MENA at Infinite Reality, and judges startups for Sweden’s Vinnova and Abu Dhabi’s Hub71. The geographic and linguistic range matters here. She has lived in nine countries, speaks five languages, and reads emerging technology adoption from Seoul, the Gulf, and the Nordics as fluently as from Silicon Valley. Boards in any of those markets get a perspective that the usual American or Western European advisory pool does not provide. Key speaking topics Emerging technology and innovation strategy Defence and peace technology Immersive technology and commerce Disinformation and information integrity Sustainability and the green transition Korean innovation systems and soft power MENA technology ecosystems Ideal for Boards and executive teams making frontier technology investment or deployment decisions Chief innovation, strategy, and digital officers in consumer brands, automotive, and luxury Government, defence, and policy audiences engaging with dual-use technology Sustainability and ESG leads scrutinising green-transition supply chains Audience outcomes A clearer map of how a single technology operates across commercial, defence, and humanitarian use cases Specific examples of immersive technology deployment from named global brands A working view of innovation ecosystems in Korea, MENA, and the Nordics Sharper questions to put to internal teams on dual-use exposure, supply chain ethics, and emerging technology partnerships

Why organisations work with Irita Marriott A working case study of starting from outside every advantage that business literature assumes, foreign-born, self-funded, self-taught, and still arriving at ownership of a regulated specialist business. Live commercial credibility: she runs an auction house in Melbourne, Derbyshire that trades weekly, not a personal brand built on past achievement. A direct view of how a specialist trade actually works, valuations, vendor relationships, buyer psychology, that translates well into wider commercial conversations about expertise and trust. One of a small number of women who own and run an auction house in the UK, which gives her observations on under-represented leadership a concrete operational base, not a panel-circuit one. An unusual combination for an after-dinner or inspirational slot: a recognisable BBC television face who is also the principal of an active SME. Biography highlights Expert on BBC One’s Antiques Road Trip, Celebrity Antiques Road Trip and Bargain Hunt. Expert on Channel 4’s The Greatest Auction. Presenter of The Derbyshire Auction House on Really TV. Founder and principal of Irita Marriott Auctioneers and Valuers Ltd, Melbourne, Derbyshire (opened 2023). Seven years as salesroom assistant, cataloguer and valuer at a Derbyshire auction house before launching her own business. Self-taught in the antiques trade after arriving in the UK aged 20 from Latvia, via the United States. Biography Most successful entrepreneurs in British specialist trades inherit a network, a name, or both. Irita Marriott inherited neither. She arrived in the UK at twenty, having grown up on a self-sufficient farm in Latvia and worked as an au pair in the United States, and started in a Derbyshire garden centre as temporary Christmas staff. The route from there to ownership of a regulated auction house in the same county did not follow any of the standard patterns. The substantive credential is the seven years she spent inside a Derbyshire auction house as a salesroom assistant, then cataloguer, then valuer, while dealing antiques independently at fairs and car boot sales on her own time. That is the period in which the trade was actually learned. The television work began in 2021, when she sent a direct approach to the producers of Antiques Road Trip rather than waiting to be discovered, and she has since become a regular expert on Bargain Hunt, Celebrity Antiques Road Trip and Channel 4’s The Greatest Auction, alongside presenting her own Really TV series, The Derbyshire Auction House. In June 2023 she opened Irita Marriott Auctioneers and Valuers Ltd in Melbourne, Derbyshire, making her one of a small handful of women in the UK to own and run an auction house. The business runs regular sales, free public valuations and a working catalogue, which is a meaningful operational footprint rather than a personal brand exercise. For organisations, the value of her perspective is the texture of how a specialist business is actually built and run by someone who started without the conventional advantages. She is most useful to audiences who want to hear how confidence, credibility and clientele are constructed in practice, in a trade where reputation is the asset, by a principal who is still doing the work. Key speaking topics Building a specialist business from outside the industry Female ownership in male-dominated trades Reinvention across countries and careers Self-taught expertise and credibility The antiques and auction trade Combining a working business with a media profile Ideal for Founders, owner-managers and SME leadership audiences Women’s leadership networks and ERGs in commercial organisations Conferences on entrepreneurship, reinvention and career change After-dinner and awards audiences who want a substantive business story rather than a celebrity name Audience outcomes A grounded sense of what it actually takes to build a specialist business when starting without contacts, capital or industry training. A practical view of how reputation is constructed in a trust-driven trade. A direct example of how a public profile and an operating business can reinforce each other rather than compete. A perspective on under-represented leadership rooted in ownership rather than commentary.

Why organisations work with Itai Green He runs the operator’s playbook for open innovation, built on programmes delivered for named multinationals including Toyota, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Maccabi Healthcare, and Electra. He owns the access point to two of Israel’s largest vertical startup communities, ITTS (around 350 traveltech founders) and IITS for insurtech, which gives corporate audiences a direct route into live deal flow. His book with Business Expert Press, Innovation or Elimination: Winning in a World of Constant Change. An Executive Playbook (2026), codifies a two-decade framework for collaboration between corporates and startups, so the keynote carries a published thesis rather than a deck. He has briefed senior commercial audiences at repeat Economist summits, UNWTO, and Amcham Brazil’s CEO Forum, which means he calibrates to board-level decision makers, not technology enthusiasts. He was inside corporate innovation at Amadeus IT Group before building the consultancy, so he speaks to the internal politics of innovation programmes from the same side of the table as the buyer. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Innovate Israel (2017 to present). Former Head of Business Development and Innovation, Amadeus IT Group Israel. Former CEO, Maxtech Technologies; former VP Business Development, Techtium; prior roles at Elbit. Co-founder, JerusalemOnline. Author, Innovation or Elimination: Winning in a World of Constant Change. An Executive Playbook (Business Expert Press, 2026). Founder of the ITTS and IITS startup communities covering traveltech and insurtech in Israel. Keynote speaker at Economist summits (2018 to 2022), UNWTO Tourism Startup Competition, and Amcham Brazil CEO Forum. Biography Most corporate innovation programmes fail quietly. They produce pilots, demo days, and scouting reports, but very little that reaches a P&L. The gap is not talent or budget; it is the wiring between the corporate and the outside ecosystem it claims to work with. Itai Green has spent two decades inside that wiring. As Head of Business Development and Innovation at Amadeus IT Group in Israel, and before that as a CEO and operator across Maxtech, Techtium, and Elbit, he built the internal muscle that most large organisations are still trying to grow. In 2017 he founded Innovate Israel to run that playbook for global corporates, connecting them to Israeli startups across IT, pharma, finance, travel, retail, banking, insurance, energy, and construction tech. Client work has included Toyota, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Maccabi Healthcare, and Electra. Alongside the consulting practice, he built two of the largest sector communities in Israel’s ecosystem. ITTS (Israel Travel Tech Startups) now covers around 350 founders. IITS does the same job for insurance technology. For a corporate buyer, those communities are the live deal flow behind the keynote. His book Innovation or Elimination: Winning in a World of Constant Change. An Executive Playbook (Business Expert Press, 2026) sets out the framework he has been using with clients: how leadership teams structure open innovation, how they absorb external technology without breaking their core business, and how they stop confusing pilots with outcomes. Key speaking topics Open innovation and corporate-startup collaboration Generative AI in corporate strategy Israeli innovation ecosystem and ecosystem engagement Traveltech and insurtech Corporate venturing and scouting models Innovation leadership and organisational readiness Business model innovation under geopolitical and tariff pressure Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers, Heads of Corporate Venturing, and Chief Strategy Officers building or resetting an open innovation function. Executive committees in travel, insurance, pharma, retail, energy, and banking evaluating engagement with Israel’s startup ecosystem. Business development and R&D leaders who have active scouting but no reliable path from pilot to deployment. Boards and CEO forums looking for an operator’s view on turning innovation spend into commercial growth. Audience outcomes A working definition of what separates a functioning open innovation programme from a scouting theatre. A clear map of how to engage with Israel’s startup ecosystem without burning internal credibility on dead-end pilots. A perspective on where generative AI shifts the corporate-startup dynamic, grounded in live client work rather than forecasts. Specific internal structures and incentives that leaders can use to move a pilot from proof of concept to a line of business. A candid read on where open innovation tends to fail inside large corporates, from someone who has sat on both sides.

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

Why organisations work with Jake Havron He treats influence as a learnable skill with named components (motivators, decision methods, body language, congruence), not a personality trait, which gives sales and leadership teams something they can actually practise. He has trained inside revenue-heavy environments rather than seminar rooms, including real estate organisations reporting $300M to $1.6B in annual sales and the HVAC contractor audience at ACCA 2024. His material is built for entrepreneurial and mastermind audiences, GoBundance, MentorBox, 180 Elevate, where the bar for application is high and theory does not survive the room. The framework targets the gap between effort and persuasion that most sales managers describe but cannot name: why two reps with identical scripts close at different rates. Biography highlights Founder of Dream Life Mastery Company and co-founder of FORDIFY, a personal branding agency whose clients include Life Time Fitness. Keynote speaker at the ACCA 2024 conference, addressing roughly 1,000 HVAC contractors on leading with influence. Trainer for GoBundance, MentorBox, 787 Coffee Co. and 180 Elevate Nonprofit. Has worked with real estate sales organisations reporting between $300M and $1.6B in annual revenue. Co-leads the ITfactor Mentorship Program with speaker Emily Ford. Background as a registered nurse before moving into business strategy and speaking. Biography Most sales and leadership development still treats influence as a soft skill, something either you have or you do not. Havron’s argument is the opposite. Influence has structure. People shift their decisions for identifiable reasons, and a salesperson or leader who cannot name those reasons is guessing in the room. His “4 Pillars of Influence” framework, motivators, decision methods, body language and congruence, is built around that claim. Each pillar names a variable a practitioner can read in a live conversation and adjust. It is a working model for people whose income depends on whether the person across the table moves. The audiences he trains tend to be commercially exposed: real estate teams in the $300M to $1.6B revenue range, mastermind communities like GoBundance, and trade audiences such as the ACCA 2024 contractor conference. He also co-founded FORDIFY, a personal branding agency that has worked with brands including Life Time Fitness, and runs the ITfactor Mentorship Program with Emily Ford. Havron’s path into the work is unusual. He was a registered nurse before building Dream Life Mastery Company and moving full-time into strategy and keynote work. The clinical background shows up in how he teaches: behaviour first, theory second, and a bias toward what a person can actually do differently on Monday morning. Key speaking topics Influence in sales Influence in leadership Self-leadership and personal effectiveness Sales team performance Communication and persuasion Entrepreneurial leadership Ideal for Sales leaders and high-performing sales teams in revenue-driven sectors Entrepreneur and founder communities, mastermind groups, and scale-up leadership audiences Franchise and channel-partner audiences where influence sits at the centre of the commercial model Front-line managers stepping into senior leadership roles for the first time Audience outcomes A named, four-part vocabulary for influence that teams can apply in live sales and leadership conversations. The ability to read motivators and decision methods in a counterpart, not just deliver a script. A separation between influence and pressure tactics, and a working sense of why the second tends to backfire. Specific adjustments leaders can make in body language and congruence when the room is not moving with them.

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

Why organisations work with Jamie Kern Lima A founder track record at a scale almost no speaker in the entrepreneurship category can match: a category-creating consumer brand sold to L’Oreal for $1.2 billion, after Sephora said no for six years and QVC said no for three. First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s history, with direct operating experience inside a $30 billion strategic acquirer post-acquisition, not just pre-exit. Two New York Times bestselling books, “Believe IT” and “Worthy”, giving sales teams and leadership audiences a tested framework on rejection and self-worth that the speaker has already road-tested with millions of readers. Host of the Gracie Award-winning Jamie Kern Lima Show, with first-time podcast interviews from figures including Meghan Markle and Michelle Obama, which gives the platform reach and the speaker a sharpened interviewer’s instinct for what actually moves an audience. A Columbia MBA and Columbia Business School board member who chooses to lead with the founder story, not the credential stack. The buyer gets the substance underneath the inspiration. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of IT Cosmetics; sold to L’Oreal in 2016 for $1.2 billion. First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s 100+ year history. Two-time New York Times bestselling author: “Believe IT” (Simon & Schuster, 2021) and “Worthy” (Hay House, 2024). Host of “The Jamie Kern Lima Show”, winner of the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast, Lifestyle. Guest Shark, ABC’s Shark Tank, Season 16. MBA, Columbia Business School; member of the Columbia Business School Board of Overseers. Listed on Forbes’ America’s Richest Self-Made Women. Biography IT Cosmetics was turned down by Sephora for six years and by QVC for three before Jamie Kern Lima got either retailer on the phone. By 2016 the company was the largest luxury makeup brand in America, and L’Oreal paid $1.2 billion to acquire it. She became the first female CEO of a brand in the group’s history. The founding story is unusual because the product positioning was unusual. IT Cosmetics was built around real skin: rosacea, hyperpigmentation, post-chemotherapy skin, customers QVC’s buyers were not used to seeing on camera. Kern Lima insisted on putting them there. That decision, more than any single marketing tactic, is what separated the brand from the prestige beauty pack and made it acquirable at scale. Post-exit, she has built a second platform with similar discipline. “Believe IT” and “Worthy” are both New York Times bestsellers; “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” won the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast in the lifestyle category, on the back of first-ever podcast interviews with Meghan Markle and a multi-part series with Oprah Winfrey. She is on the board of overseers at Columbia Business School, where she earned her MBA in 2004. For a corporate audience, the relevant content is concrete. How a category-creating consumer brand survives years of rejection from the gatekeepers it depends on. How founder-led marketing competes with conglomerate marketing budgets. What changes inside the business the day a $30 billion strategic acquirer owns it. What stays the same. Key speaking topics Founder-led brand building and category creation Selling to and operating inside a strategic acquirer Authenticity as a marketing operating principle Rejection as a sales and growth discipline Direct retail, on-camera selling and QVC scale-up Resilience and self-worth for senior leaders Women’s entrepreneurship at scale Ideal for Sales kick-offs, especially in consumer, retail, beauty, and direct-to-consumer categories CMOs and brand teams reframing what “authentic” marketing means in practice Founder and scale-up audiences inside corporate venture, accelerator, and women’s leadership programmes Annual conferences seeking a headline keynote with mainstream cultural reach Audience outcomes A working playbook on building demand for a consumer brand the trade buyers have already rejected A clearer framework for how founder-led companies should think about brand voice after acquisition Specific tactics on handling rejection as a recurring operational event, not a one-off setback A renewed willingness, particularly among senior women, to put their own conviction back at the centre of commercial decisions

Why organisations work with Jamie Siminoff He has the full founder arc on the record: invented a product category in a garage, pitched it on national television and walked out without a deal, rebuilt from near-bankruptcy, and sold to Amazon for about 1 billion dollars. He has run the acquired business inside Big Tech, giving buyers a rare view of what integration, reporting lines, and product autonomy look like after a landmark exit. He has repeated the cycle: founded Honest Day’s Work, sold it to Latch Inc., took the CEO seat at the acquirer, then returned to Amazon as a VP running Ring and adjacent smart home units. Most speakers have one exit story; he has a sequence. The Shark Tank rejection is specific and documented, which makes the resilience material credible rather than motivational. It is cited by the Sharks themselves as one of the biggest misses in the show’s history. He co-authored “Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door” with Andrew Postman, published in November 2025, which gives buyers a named, durable reference point for the material. Biography highlights Founder and original CEO of Ring, acquired by Amazon in 2018 for approximately 1 billion dollars. Pitched DoorBot on ABC’s Shark Tank in 2013 and left without a deal; returned to the show as a guest Shark in 2018. Earlier founder of PhoneTag, the first voicemail to text service, and Unsubscribe.com, both acquired. Founder of Honest Day’s Work, acquired by Latch Inc. in 2023; subsequently appointed CEO of Latch. Rejoined Amazon in 2025 as Vice President running Ring and related smart home businesses, leading a pivot to AI. Babson College, Class of 1999, and Honorary Doctor of Laws from Babson in 2021, where he delivered the undergraduate commencement address. Co-author with Andrew Postman of “Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door,” published November 2025. Biography Ring began as DoorBot, a Wi-Fi video doorbell built in a garage in 2011. By 2013 it was on Shark Tank, where every investor passed. The company was close to running out of money. Seven years later, Amazon bought it for roughly 1 billion dollars. That arc is the material Siminoff brings to the stage, and he brings it with the receipts. The more useful part of the story for serious operators is what happened between the rejection and the exit. Siminoff rebuilt the product and the brand, raised from Kleiner Perkins, Qualcomm Ventures, Goldman Sachs, DFJ Growth and Sir Richard Branson, and built Ring into a category defining consumer technology business. After the Amazon acquisition he stayed inside the company for five years, running Ring alongside Blink, Amazon Key and adjacent smart home lines. Most founder talks stop at the exit. His continues through integration. He has since extended the pattern. He founded Honest Day’s Work, sold it to Latch Inc. in 2023, stepped in as Latch’s CEO, and in 2025 rejoined Amazon as a Vice President running Ring and nearby smart home units, now pivoting the category toward AI. In November 2025 he published “Ding Dong” with Andrew Postman, the first full account of how Ring actually got built. A Babson graduate and Honorary Doctor of Laws from the same institution, he is one of a small group of founders who can speak to rejection, category creation, acquisition, and re-entry as connected stages of one working life. Key speaking topics Consumer technology product invention and category creation Scaling from prototype to acquisition Founder resilience through investor rejection Operating an acquired business inside Big Tech Smart home, connected devices, and AI in consumer hardware Brand building in hardware startups Hiring and team building in early stage companies Ideal for Founders, CEOs and product leaders in consumer technology and connected hardware Corporate innovation, strategy and M and A teams working on acquisition integration Investor audiences and startup ecosystems running portfolio or founder programmes Entrepreneurship centres and executive education audiences in business schools Audience outcomes A concrete, non-generic view of what it takes to get a hardware startup from prototype to billion-dollar exit. A working model for how to treat a high-profile rejection as distribution rather than a verdict. Specific insight into how an acquired category runs inside a company like Amazon, and what that means for teams going through similar integrations. A clear read on where consumer smart home and home security technology are heading as AI becomes the core layer of the product. Hiring and early team construction principles drawn from building Ring from a Craigslist hire list to a company sold for 1 billion dollars.

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