Innovación del Modelo de Negocio

Why organisations work with Dietmar Dahmen Two decades inside the rooms where global brands are built, with senior creative leadership at DDB, Ogilvy and BBDO across Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, Munich and Vienna. The reference points are operator reference points. A Chief Innovation Officer track record at ecx.io, the digital agency that scaled into an IBM acquisition, which gives him a working view of how creative ambition turns into delivered technology product. Author of “Transformation. BAMM!” with Marcus Bond, published by Murmann Verlag, with a specific thesis on the “volcano economy” and a working compass tool for leadership teams reshaping their business model. Recognised by the European Association of Communication Agencies as their expert on disruption and future marketing, which gives the perspective institutional weight beyond bureau marketing. A stage craft that lands the argument. The presentation is theatrical, with stage walls built and broken on cue, a flame thrower used to dramatise climate urgency, and custom animation cut for each event. Senior audiences who have seen too many slide decks remember the content because of how it is delivered. Biography highlights Senior creative leadership at DDB, Ogilvy and BBDO, including Chief Creative Officer and Managing Director roles. Chief Innovation Officer at ecx.io, the digital agency acquired by IBM. Founder and Managing Director of Brainkicks GmbH, his current consulting and keynote practice. Co-author of “Transformation. BAMM! Management in der Vulkanoekonomie” (Murmann Verlag, 2017) with Marcus Bond. Lecturer in disruptive advertising at Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, with students collecting sixteen gold and silver awards at the Cannes Young Director Award during his tenure. Guest lecturer in marketing innovation at Boston University and LMU Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Honorary member of the Federal Association for AI Transformation in Germany (Bundesverband für KI-Transformation). Designated expert on disruption and future marketing for the European Association of Communication Agencies (EACA); member of Creative Club Austria and Art Directors Club Germany. Biography The category boundaries that organised global marketing for a generation are blurring. Customer journeys cross channels that did not exist five years ago, brand differentiation decays faster than media budgets can refresh it, and the parts of the business that used to be safe (distribution, pricing power, retail relationships) are the parts most exposed. Senior marketing and innovation teams know they are being asked to remake the commercial engine while it is still running. Dietmar Dahmen has worked that problem from inside the global creative system. He built his career as Creative Director at DDB, Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy, and Chief Creative Officer and Managing Director at BBDO, across Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, Munich and Vienna. The agency seat is what gave him repeated exposure to the moment when a brand has to choose between defending the position that made it and committing to the position that might. He then took the operator turn that gives the work its current shape. As Chief Innovation Officer at ecx.io, he helped scale the digital agency that IBM later acquired, which moved his thinking from creative campaign output toward technology-enabled customer experience and commercial model design. His book with Marcus Bond, “Transformation. BAMM!” published by Murmann Verlag in 2017, sets out the “volcano economy” thesis: markets where new positions emerge and disappear at unexpected points, and where conventional planning logic is precisely the constraint to challenge. The institutional credentials sit alongside the practitioner record. He is the European Association of Communication Agencies’ designated expert on disruption and future marketing, lectured disruptive advertising at Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg for close to a decade, and his students collected sixteen gold and silver awards at the Cannes Young Director Award during that period. Boards bring him in when the question is not “what is the trend” but “what are we willing to break, and what do we keep, when the category we built around no longer holds.” Key speaking topics Disruption and business model reinvention Future of marketing and brand Customer centricity and experience design Innovation strategy Digital transformation in marketing organisations Change leadership in creative and commercial functions Ideal for CMOs, brand presidents and heads of marketing transformation Chief Innovation Officers and digital strategy leads Boards and executive committees navigating category disruption Senior creative and agency leadership groups Audience outcomes A working language for diagnosing where their category is fracturing and where their current strategy is exposed. A sharper view of which assumptions in the existing business model are now constraints rather than advantages. Specific provocations on customer-centric reinvention drawn from inside global agency and digital transformation work. Renewed willingness in the room to commit to changes that the operating plan has been deferring.

Why organisations work with Dino Sofos He has built category-leading shows in two different genres, launching Dua Lipa’s At Your Service as Persephonica’s first title and co-creating The News Agents, which hit 24 million downloads in seven months. He ran BBC News Podcasts for long enough to learn what works at scale: 85 million downloads across Brexitcast, Americast and Newscast during his tenure as editor. He understands the commercial crossover between audio and broadcast, having been the first editor to transfer a current affairs podcast, Brexitcast, onto BBC One in 2019. He speaks from operator experience, not commentary, which makes him useful to executives weighing real decisions about content, talent and audience strategy. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Persephonica, an independent audio production company established in 2021. Former Editor of BBC News Podcasts, with 14 years at the BBC. Creator of Brexitcast, Americast and Newscast for the BBC. Brexitcast won the Listeners’ Choice award at the British Podcast Awards 2019. Co-creator of The News Agents with Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, produced in partnership with Global. Producer of Dua Lipa: At Your Service, featuring guests including Elton John, Amal Clooney and Pedro Almodovar. Biography Brexitcast started inside the BBC as an experiment in how political reporters talked to each other when the cameras were off. Dino Sofos was the editor who turned that informal energy into a format, then into a habit, then onto BBC One in 2019, the first time a current affairs podcast had crossed over to television. That move, and the 85 million downloads accumulated by BBC News Podcasts during his editorship, gave him a specific kind of knowledge. He understands how audio formats work commercially, how much of audience loyalty is structural rather than topical, and why most attempts to manufacture habit fail in the first six weeks. He left the BBC in 2021 to found Persephonica. The company launched with Dua Lipa’s At Your Service, featuring guests from Elton John to Pedro Almodovar, and followed with The News Agents, co-created with Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall in partnership with Global. The News Agents became the UK’s most downloaded daily news podcast, reaching 24 million downloads in seven months. For organisations trying to build their own audience, his value is less about podcasting as a channel and more about the operating discipline behind it: choosing the right voices, designing formats that reward return listening, and running the commercial side of attention without losing the editorial instinct that attracted people in the first place. Key speaking topics Podcasting and digital audio strategy Building loyal audiences at scale Creative entrepreneurship and independent production Talent identification and format design Editorial innovation in news and current affairs Commercial models for original content Ideal for CMOs and communications directors weighing investment in owned audio and content formats Media, publishing and broadcasting leaders considering how to adapt for a podcast-first audience Founders and heads of content designing subscriber or listener strategies HR and internal comms leaders looking at audio for employee engagement and leadership storytelling Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what separates shows that build habit from content that merely accumulates views. Practical reference points from launching chart-topping podcasts in both celebrity and news formats. Specific lessons from editorial formats such as Brexitcast, Americast and The News Agents on pairing talent with structure. A working view of the commercial and talent economics of independent production.

Why organisations work with Dirk Ahlborn He has operated, not theorised, one of the largest crowd-powered equity companies ever built, with hundreds of contributors working for future equity on a single transport moonshot. He took an open concept posted publicly by Elon Musk and turned it into an incorporated global venture with government-level feasibility partnerships, giving leaders a concrete template for converting ideas into companies. His JumpStartFund platform is studied as a Harvard Business School case on crowd-powered innovation ecosystems, which gives the argument institutional weight beyond bureau bios. He brings a specific point of view on how to structure incentives, intellectual property and contribution when the workforce is distributed, part-time and equity-aligned rather than payrolled. He speaks from direct operator experience in alternative energy, manufacturing and transport, not from consulting on innovation as an abstract discipline. Biography highlights Co-founder and Chairman of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a company incubated on a crowd-powered equity model. Founder and CEO of JumpStarter Inc., operator of the JumpStartFund crowdsourcing platform. Subject of a Harvard Business School case study on crowd-powered innovation ecosystems. Keynote speaker at SXSW, the World Economic Forum, CES and the Smart Mobility World Congress. Featured in Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe. Contributor to the Bosch Global thought leadership platform. Biography Hyperloop Transportation Technologies was set up in 2013 using a method almost no serious company had tried at that scale: hundreds of contributors working ten hours a week in exchange for stock options, coordinated through an online platform. The company that emerged went on to sign feasibility agreements with multiple governments. The interesting argument is not the train. It is the operating model. That model came out of JumpStartFund, the crowdsourcing platform Ahlborn launched the same year in El Segundo. The platform was designed to solve a specific problem, which is that most ideas never become companies because the capital, talent and coordination to build them sit in separate silos. JumpStartFund compressed those into one process. Harvard Business School has published a case study on how that works. Ahlborn’s background is unusually operational for someone running a moonshot. He started in Berlin banking in 1993, moved to Italy and built alternative energy and interior design businesses through the 1990s, and joined the Girvan Institute of Technology in Southern California in 2009 to help commercialise early-stage tech linked to NASA’s Ames Research Center. That sequence matters because his argument is not theoretical. He has built, sold and scaled businesses across sectors that rarely share a playbook. What he offers serious organisations is a working thesis on how to mobilise contribution at scale without hiring at scale, tested against one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the last decade. The thesis is portable. The specifics, stock-for-time structures, advisory-point commissions, crowd-led IP generation, translate into any organisation trying to attempt something its existing headcount and budget were not designed to deliver. Key speaking topics Crowd-powered venture building New business models for the post-industrial economy Entrepreneurship and distributed equity The future of transportation Innovation ecosystems and platform design Leading moonshot projects inside and outside the corporation Ideal for CEOs and founders designing new venture models outside conventional VC structures. Innovation, strategy and corporate venture leads running moonshot or skunkworks programmes. Transport, infrastructure and mobility leaders tracking what comes after road and rail. Boards weighing how to structure equity, IP and contribution in distributed organisations. Audience outcomes A concrete framework for running a crowd-powered venture, drawn from an operating example rather than a theoretical model. A clearer view of when equity-for-time structures work, and when they break. Specific language for pitching non-standard venture models to boards and institutional partners. A sharper read on what the next decade of transport, mobility and infrastructure investment is likely to reward.

Why organisations work with Hubertus Porschen He speaks to mid-market boards from inside the same world. As the elected federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer from 2015 to 2018, he represented Germany’s young Mittelstand owners directly to policymakers and to ASU/Die Familienunternehmer. He has built and run digital businesses, not just advised on them. App-Arena and iConsultants give him a working vocabulary for what actually breaks when a traditional company tries to digitise a business model. His book Digitaler Suizid frames digital inertia as an existential risk to German firms, an argument that lands with audiences who have heard the optimistic version too often. He works in German and English with equal credibility, which matters for groups whose senior leadership sits across DACH and the wider European market. Biography highlights Federal Chairman, Die Jungen Unternehmer (BJU), 2015 to 2018, the young-entrepreneurs body within the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. Doctorate in economics, University of Marburg, with a dissertation on the academic entrepreneur. Author of Digitaler Suizid, on the digitalisation gap in the German economy. Founder and operator of multiple digital ventures including App-Arena GmbH; partner at iConsultants GmbH. Lecturer at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne. Listed in Top 100 Speakers Excellence 2026 by Speakers Excellence. Biography The German Mittelstand is one of the most successful industrial structures in Europe. It is also one of the slowest to absorb new technology. That tension defines the working subject matter of Hubertus Porschen. He spent three years, from 2015 to 2018, as federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer, the young-entrepreneurs wing of the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. The role put him in regular contact with policymakers in Berlin and with several thousand owner-managers running mid-sized German firms. The work that followed, as a speaker and as a founder, builds directly on that constituency. His operating experience is the second pillar. App-Arena, an online marketplace for social media applications, and iConsultants, a digital advisory practice, gave him direct exposure to the gap between digital strategy decks and the messy reality of changing how a 150-person company actually works. His book Digitaler Suizid develops the argument: German firms that treat digitisation as a marketing project rather than an operating one are quietly removing themselves from their own future. Today his keynote work concentrates on artificial intelligence: specifically the question of how a board moves from “AI-interested” to “AI-ready” without paralysing the operating business in the process. He lectures at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne, holds a doctorate from the University of Marburg, and is listed in Speakers Excellence’s Top 100 for 2026. Key speaking topics Artificial intelligence in mid-market operations Digital transformation in family-owned and Mittelstand businesses Entrepreneurship and founder leadership Innovation and disruption in traditional industries Change management across generational workforces Digital business model design Ideal for Boards and executive teams of family-owned and Mittelstand firms in DACH CEOs, COOs and digital leaders confronting an AI adoption gap Industry associations and chambers of commerce convening member firms Founder networks and entrepreneurship programmes in German-speaking markets Audience outcomes A clearer sense of where their organisation sits on the line between AI-interested and AI-ready A working argument for why digital inertia is a strategic, not operational, risk Specific examples of how German mid-market companies have moved digital initiatives out of pilot Vocabulary to talk to a sceptical board about AI without leaning on vendor language

Why organisations work with Tye Caldwell He built a venture-backed marketplace inside an industry with almost no tech infrastructure, took it to more than 1,000 cities, and exited it. The arc is rare and instructive. He pairs 26 years as a working salon operator with the founder seat, giving him operator credibility that pure tech founders cannot replicate. He has been through the full investor cycle, accelerators including Google for Startups, the EY Entrepreneurs Access Network, accelerator wins, growth pressure, and an acquisition under strain. The lessons are first-hand. He addresses economic mobility and the practical mechanics of creating earning opportunities in underserved markets, drawn from a marketplace that did exactly that for independent stylists and barbers. He is comfortable in front of corporate audiences and small business audiences, having spoken at Google, on Rolling Stone Culture Council panels, and at continuing education events where his book is part of the curriculum. Biography highlights Cofounder and former Chief Strategy Officer, ShearShare, acquired November 2024 Winner, Judges’ Favorite, Google Demo Day 2018 (first Texas startup to win) 2024 EY Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort member Pitchbook Black Founder to Watch 2023; Power 100 Business Leaders of Color 2023 Author, “Mentored by Failure: A 5-Point Guide to Long-Term Success in the Beauty & Style Industry,” used in continuing education curricula 26 years as a master barber-stylist and former owner of an award-winning Dallas salon Biography ShearShare started not as an app but as a workaround. Caldwell, running an award-winning Dallas salon, noticed that stylists and barbers wanted day leases rather than long contracts. He spent three years manually matching cosmetologists to empty chairs before building the platform. By the time the company won Judges’ Favorite at Google Demo Day 2018, the operating model had already been pressure-tested by a working salon owner. The company went on to reach more than 1,000 cities, secured a corporate partnership with JC Penney’s salon network, and was selected for the 2024 EY Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort. In November 2024, ShearShare was acquired by a strategic buyer in the industry and the Caldwells exited. The full arc, identification of an underserved category, accelerator traction, growth capital, partnership wins, and an acquisition under financial strain, gives Caldwell unusual range as a commentator on what scale actually costs. He pairs that founder track with 26 years inside the industry he disrupted. He is a master barber-stylist, an educator, an advisory board member for beauty schools, and the author of “Mentored by Failure,” a #1 bestselling guide used in continuing education curricula. Operator credibility runs through the work, not as a marketing line but as the source of the thesis. His most cited talks address how to lead a startup when the seat is peerless, how to translate operator expertise into a tech founder’s commercial vocabulary, and how marketplaces can be designed to move earnings into underserved communities. He has been recognised as a Pitchbook Black Founder to Watch and a Power 100 Business Leader of Color, and his work has been profiled in Fast Company, the New York Times, Forbes and TechCrunch. Key speaking topics B2B marketplace founding and scaling Operator-to-tech-founder transition Economic mobility through platform design Startup CEO resilience and decision-making Co-founder partnerships and founder relationships Accelerator and venture capital experience Small business growth in the beauty and services industry Ideal for Founders, scale-up CEOs, and venture-backed leadership teams Corporate innovation, marketplace and platform business unit leads Diversity and supplier development teams sourcing operator-credible voices Industry associations and continuing education programmes in beauty, barbering and services Audience outcomes A founder account of building a marketplace inside a low-tech, fragmented industry The operational reality of moving from owner-operator to venture-backed CEO Specifics on how accelerators, corporate partnerships and capital cycles played out across one company’s arc A practitioner view of how marketplace design can create earnings access in underserved markets Direct lessons from an acquisition under financial pressure, not a polished exit narrative

Why organisations work with Eric Maskin He is one of three economists who built the field that now underpins auction design, procurement, and market regulation across the developed world. Few speakers can claim intellectual authorship of a discipline their audience already uses. His frameworks answer a concrete question boards wrestle with: when an incentive system fails, is the fault in execution, in the people, or in the design itself? Maskin’s work gives a disciplined way to tell the difference. On voting and collective decision rules, his recent work with Amartya Sen and Edward Foley offers leaders a sharper vocabulary for how groups should choose, directly relevant to governance, board process, and platform moderation. He brings the Harvard chair, the Nobel, and the former presidency of the Econometric Society, but speaks to business audiences in the register of a colleague reasoning through a problem, not a laureate delivering a lecture. Biography highlights 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson, for the foundations of mechanism design theory. Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University. Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2000 to 2011. Past President of the Econometric Society and the Game Theory Society. Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1984 to 1990. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the National Academy of Sciences; holder of 18 honorary doctorates. Biography Mechanism design is the branch of economics that asks a practical question: if you want a specific outcome from a group of people with different information and different interests, what rules will produce it? The Royal Swedish Academy cited that question when it awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Leonid Hurwicz, Roger Myerson, and Eric Maskin. Maskin’s contribution, often called Maskin monotonicity, set the conditions under which a social goal can actually be implemented through the behaviour of self-interested agents. The theory now sits behind spectrum auctions, procurement design, matching markets, and a large share of modern regulatory economics. His institutional record follows the work. He taught at MIT from 1977 to 1984, at Harvard from 1985 to 2000, and held the Albert O. Hirschman chair at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until 2012, when Harvard named him Adams University Professor. He edited the Quarterly Journal of Economics for six years and served as President of both the Econometric Society and the Game Theory Society. More recent work has turned to voting. With Amartya Sen in The New York Review of Books, and in subsequent papers with Edward Foley, Maskin has argued for Condorcet-style rules over plurality and ranked-choice systems on the grounds that they track majority preference more faithfully. For boards, regulators, and platform operators, the underlying question is the same as the one that won the Nobel: which rule produces the outcome the institution actually wants. Key speaking topics Mechanism design and the economics of incentives Auction design and market allocation Regulation, competition policy, and market power Voting rules and collective decision systems Governance and institutional design Innovation, patents, and intellectual property Ideal for Boards and executive committees redesigning incentive, compensation, or partnership structures Regulators, central banks, and policy leaders working on auctions, procurement, or market oversight Platform operators and market-makers setting allocation, pricing, or moderation rules Senior economics and strategy audiences at investor conferences and leadership summits Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing when an incentive failure is a design problem, not a people problem Concrete examples of how auction and market-design choices change who wins and what is produced A sharper view of voting and decision rules for governance, board process, and group choice Direct exposure to the reasoning of one of the architects of modern economic theory, applied to questions leaders actually face

Why organisations work with Eric Ries He authored the operating method most used by modern product teams. When a CFO asks how an innovation portfolio should be measured and governed, the answer most large companies reach for is his. He has tested the method inside GE, IBM, Intuit, and the US federal government, not just early-stage startups, so the case studies he draws on are at enterprise scale. He founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, a SEC-approved national securities exchange. That gives him a working perspective on how ownership structure and reporting cadence shape executive behaviour, well beyond a consultant’s view. His new book Incorruptible reframes corporate governance as a strategic act, addressing why successful companies drift from the principles that built them. Useful for boards under pressure on mission, accountability, and long-term value. Biography highlights Author of The Lean Startup, The Startup Way, and Incorruptible (Authors Equity, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2026). Founder and Executive Chairman of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, approved by the SEC in 2019. Architect of GE’s FastWorks program under CEO Jeff Immelt, applied across thousands of GE executives. Former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School and IDEO Fellow; advisor to Pivotal. Ranked #12 on the Thinkers50 list (2019); The Lean Startup on the Thinkers50 Management Classics Booklist (2023). Biography Most large companies are excellent at running the business they already have and unreliable at building the next one. The systems that govern the core business, budgets, milestones, quarterly review, were not designed for ventures whose value is mostly unknown at the point of funding. Eric Ries spent two decades turning that mismatch into a working method. The Lean Startup, published in 2011, codified validated learning, the minimum viable product, and innovation accounting as a portable management discipline. The book has been translated into more than thirty languages and now sits on the Thinkers50 Management Classics Booklist. Its follow-up, The Startup Way, captured what happens when those ideas are pushed into established companies. The case studies are drawn from inside GE, where Ries worked with CEO Jeff Immelt on the FastWorks program, alongside engagements with IBM, Intuit, and the US federal government. The governance question runs through all of his work. In 2015 he proposed the Long-Term Stock Exchange in The Lean Startup; the SEC approved LTSE as a national securities exchange in 2019, and Ries serves as Executive Chairman. His 2026 book Incorruptible, published by Authors Equity and distributed by Simon & Schuster, argues that good companies fail predictably because ownership, incentives, and accountability quietly reshape behaviour as they scale. The book was selected for the Thinkers50 Best New Management Booklist. What separates Ries from other innovation speakers is range. He has authored the methodology, run the corporate transformations that test it, and built a regulated capital-markets venue to address the structural problem his books diagnose. For senior teams that want innovation handled as a portfolio discipline, not a culture programme, he is the source. Key speaking topics Lean Startup methodology Innovation accounting and the management of internal ventures Entrepreneurial management inside established companies Corporate governance and long-term value AI applied to product validation and customer acquisition The Long-Term Stock Exchange and capital-markets reform Ideal for CEOs and boards of public companies wrestling with quarterly pressure versus long-horizon investment. Chief innovation, strategy, and transformation officers responsible for portfolios of new ventures inside large organisations. Founders and senior leaders of scale-up companies preparing for institutional ownership. Corporate development and venture teams looking to apply validated-learning discipline to internal investment decisions. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for measuring new ventures separately from the core business, drawn directly from innovation accounting. A clear diagnosis of why most corporate innovation programmes fail at the governance layer rather than the creativity layer. A view of how ownership structure, board cadence, and reporting rules quietly shape executive behaviour over time. Specific case material from GE, IBM, Intuit, and US federal agencies that audiences can map onto their own structures.

Why organisations work with Fernando Trias de Bes He is the only Spanish author to have co-written books with Philip Kotler, and the frameworks in Lateral Marketing and Winning at Innovation give leadership teams a shared vocabulary for where their ideas actually come from. Winning at Innovation, with its A-to-F Model, won the CMI Innovation and Entrepreneurship category at the 2013 Management Book of the Year Awards, a credential that speaks directly to boards asking how innovation should be structured inside the firm. He runs Salvetti and Llombart, a Barcelona-based consumer research and innovation consultancy whose client list has included PepsiCo, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle and McKinsey, which means the classroom work is tested against paying clients. He bridges two registers most economists do not reach, serious academic marketing theory and popular business writing, and audiences that have read La buena suerte or El libro negro del emprendedor often arrive already familiar with his thinking. He presents in English and Spanish and has been delivering executive-level keynotes since 2003, with hundreds of international engagements behind him. Biography highlights Associate Professor of Marketing Management at ESADE Business School since 1994. Co-author with Philip Kotler of Lateral Marketing (Wiley, 2003) and Winning at Innovation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). CMI Management Book of the Year 2013, Innovation and Entrepreneurship category, for Winning at Innovation. Founder and President of Salvetti and Llombart, a consumer insight and innovation consultancy working with PepsiCo, Sony, HP, Nestle and McKinsey. Regular columnist for La Vanguardia, ARA and El Pais Semanal; author of more than twenty books of essay and fiction translated into more than thirty languages. Winner of the Premio Espasa de Ensayo (2015), Premio De Hoy de Ensayo (2009) and Shinpukai Prize (Japan, 2005). Biography Most innovation in large companies is lateral in name only. Teams segment further, tweak an existing product, and call it new. Fernando Trias de Bes spent two decades arguing, in books co-written with Philip Kotler, that this is the core reason corporate pipelines stall, and building methods that address it directly. Lateral Marketing, published by Wiley in 2003, set out a structured way to generate product concepts that do not come from narrower segmentation but from a different logical operation on the category itself. Winning at Innovation, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011, took the argument further with the A-to-F Model, a step-by-step description of the roles and stages an organisation needs to convert ideas into launches. The Chartered Management Institute named it Innovation and Entrepreneurship Book of the Year at its 2013 awards. Trias de Bes has taught marketing and innovation at ESADE Business School since 1994 and runs Salvetti and Llombart, the Barcelona consumer research and innovation consultancy he co-founded in 1996. Clients have included PepsiCo, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, McKinsey and Nestle, which gives the academic frameworks a field of consumer goods and services to answer to. Beyond the business books he writes columns for La Vanguardia, ARA and El Pais Semanal, and has published essays and novels translated into more than thirty languages, including La buena suerte, co-written with Alex Rovira, and El libro negro del emprendedor. The Premio Espasa de Ensayo in 2015 sits alongside earlier recognition in Japan and Spain. That range, economist, consultant, columnist, novelist, is the unusual shape of the author, and it is what audiences tend to remember from the keynote. Key speaking topics Business model innovation Lateral marketing and creativity in commercial strategy The A-to-F Model for organising innovation Entrepreneurship and the economics of new ventures Economic trends and consumer behaviour Corporate reinvention and disruptive thinking Ideal for CMOs, CSOs and heads of innovation confronting commoditised categories and stalled pipelines. Executive committees running corporate strategy offsites on growth and reinvention. Business schools and management development programmes covering innovation, marketing and entrepreneurship. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for lateral versus vertical innovation that a leadership team can use the next day. The A-to-F structure for assigning innovation roles and stages inside an organisation. Concrete examples, drawn from consumer goods and services, of where breakthrough ideas actually come from. A sharper read on why most corporate innovation produces line extensions rather than category moves.

Why organisations work with Geoff Colvin Four decades of reporting inside Fortune on how the best-run companies actually change, not a consultant’s framework imported from outside the room. The thesis behind Talent Is Overrated, a WSJ, BusinessWeek and New York Times bestseller, gives leadership teams a concrete answer to a question most duck: how do you actually build world-class performers instead of hoping you hire them. Humans Are Underrated reframes the AI conversation for executives. The argument is that empathy, group problem-solving and storytelling become the commercial differentiator, and it lands with boards that are tired of abstract automation talks. A career’s worth of on-stage interviews with Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Henry Paulson at the Fortune Global Forum translates directly into panel moderation and onstage CEO interviews that audiences remember. Read in dozens of languages and heard daily on CBS Radio, he arrives with an unusual combination of reach and specificity that senior audiences trust on first encounter. Biography highlights Senior Editor-at-Large at Fortune, where he has written the Value Driven column and covered leadership, economics and competition for four decades. Author of Talent Is Overrated, Humans Are Underrated, The Upside of the Downturn, and co-author of Angel Customers and Demon Customers. The Upside of the Downturn named Best Management Book of the Year by Strategy+Business. Former co-anchor of Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS. Daily business commentator on the CBS Radio Network, with more than 10,000 broadcasts. Lead moderator at the Fortune Global Forum, with onstage interviews of CEOs, heads of state and central bankers including Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Janet Yellen. Biography Most organisations say they want world-class performance, and most fund it with selection rather than development. Talent Is Overrated took that contradiction apart. Drawing on research into elite performers across sport, music, chess and business, Colvin argued that what separates the best is deliberate practice, the willingness to work at the edge of capability, under feedback, for years. The book became a Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and New York Times bestseller, and gave boards and chief people officers a language for building executive capability rather than buying it. Humans Are Underrated extended the argument into the automation decade. As machines absorbed more analytical and predictable work, Colvin’s case was that the commercial premium would shift to empathy, group problem-solving and persuasion, the deep human skills most leadership pipelines still treat as soft. Both books have shaped how serious HR and strategy functions think about what to develop in senior leaders. The credibility behind that writing is institutional. Colvin has spent his career at Fortune, currently as Senior Editor-at-Large, writing the Value Driven column and covering the forces reshaping competition. He co-anchored Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS, and has broadcast daily for CBS Radio with well over 10,000 segments on air. The Upside of the Downturn, his book on operating through recession, was named Best Management Book of the Year by Strategy+Business. On stage, the work shows up differently. As lead moderator of the Fortune Global Forum he has conducted onstage interviews with Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Herb Kelleher, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Janet Yellen and Henry Paulson, among many others. That experience is what corporate clients hire when they need a keynote that sets the terms of a CEO summit, or a moderator who can hold a room of chief executives to the substance. Key speaking topics Leadership in continuous disruption Executive performance and deliberate practice The human skills economy in an age of AI Business model reinvention Global economic outlook and competitive strategy Panel moderation and CEO onstage interviews Future of work and talent development Ideal for CEO, CHRO and chief learning officer audiences rethinking how senior leadership capability is built rather than bought. Boards and executive committees grappling with where automation leaves human advantage in their business model. Fortune-style CEO summits, leadership conferences and global forums that need a moderator with genuine authority across economics, technology and governance. Audience outcomes A defensible answer to how their organisation develops world-class performers, not just identifies them. A sharper read on which parts of the business automation makes cheaper, and which parts become more valuable as a result. Language for talking to boards and investors about human capability as a commercial asset, not an HR line item. Perspective from inside four decades of Fortune reporting on which leadership responses to disruption have actually worked.

Why organisations work with Guillem Graell He ran brand, digital and direct-to-fan at FC Barcelona between 2017 and 2021, a period in which the club’s digital products generated over one billion euros. Few speakers have operated a P and L of that size in this category. He built Barça Studios and BarçaTV+ from scratch into a direct-to-consumer business valued at more than 250 million euros, giving him a working blueprint for content as a revenue line, not a marketing cost. He took the club’s social footprint past 400 million followers and made it the first football club with 10 million YouTube subscribers, with engagement that consistently led the global sports rankings. He is now building, not retired. As co-founder of D2F Partners he designs, operates and funds direct-to-fan brands, so the case material in any keynote is current rather than archival. He teaches brand strategy at UPF Barcelona School of Management and marketing management at ESADE, which forces him to translate operating experience into frameworks that other leaders can use. Biography highlights Chief Marketing Officer, FC Barcelona, 2017 to 2021. Co-founder and Managing Partner, D2F Partners, building direct-to-fan businesses in sport and entertainment. Founder of Barça Studios and BarçaTV+, a direct-to-consumer venture valued at over 250 million euros. Earlier brand and marketing roles at Procter and Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser, Chupa Chups, Codorniu Group and Accenture. Faculty at UPF Barcelona School of Management (Master in Brand Strategy, since 2014) and ESADE Business School (Master in Marketing Management). Industrial Engineering, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, and General Management Programme (PDG), IESE Business School. Biography Sports clubs were among the first consumer brands to discover that their audience was bigger than their stadium and worth more than their broadcast deal. Between 2017 and 2021, FC Barcelona had to act on that fact, and the person running brand, digital and direct-to-fan inside the club was Guillem Graell. As Chief Marketing Officer, he rebuilt the club’s commercial relationship with its supporters around a direct-to-consumer model. He founded Barça Studios and launched BarçaTV+, a venture later valued at more than 250 million euros, alongside subscription, content and product lines that pushed digital revenue past one billion euros. The social audience grew past 400 million followers, and the club became the first in football to cross 10 million YouTube subscribers. His route into that role was unusual for sport. Industrial engineering at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, the General Management Programme at IESE, and brand and commercial roles at Procter and Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser, Chupa Chups, Codorniu and Accenture. The FMCG discipline of building emotional brands at scale travelled with him into one of the most-watched sporting institutions in the world. He now co-runs D2F Partners with Enric Llopart, the club’s former digital director, designing and funding direct-to-fan businesses for other sports and entertainment brands. He teaches brand strategy at UPF Barcelona School of Management and ESADE, which is where the operating playbook from Barça gets pressure-tested against other categories trying to own their audience. Key speaking topics Direct-to-consumer strategy in sport and entertainment Building and monetising LoveBrands Digital business models and content as revenue Brand transformation in legacy organisations Audience, community and fan engagement at scale Innovation in marketing and commercial models Ideal for CMOs, Chief Brand Officers and Chief Digital Officers in consumer-facing categories CEOs and boards of sports, entertainment, media and lifestyle businesses Heads of direct-to-consumer, content and digital product Marketing and growth leadership teams reframing how they own customer relationships Audience outcomes A working view of how a billion-euro digital and direct-to-fan business actually gets built and run Practical reference points for moving from audience metrics to commercial outcomes A clearer line between brand strategy, content investment and direct revenue Useful comparisons between sport, entertainment and other consumer categories trying to own the customer A confident perspective on where digital products, subscriptions and community fit inside a brand P and L

Why organisations work with Gunter Pauli He has run the experiment himself. As CEO of Ecover he built the first fully ecological factory in Malle, Belgium in 1992, and grew the business into a category-defining consumer brand before turning to systems work. The Blue Economy is a named, published framework, not a talk. The 2010 report to the Club of Rome catalogues 100 nature-inspired innovations with business cases attached, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. He sits inside the conversation that shapes long-range policy. Elected member of the Club of Rome and former executive committee member, with advisory roles for governments in Spain, Argentina, Italy and Bhutan. He converts sustainability from a cost line into a portfolio of revenue opportunities. The argument boards respond to: waste streams and local resources are unbooked revenue if you redesign around them. He founded and still leads ZERI, a working network of scientists and entrepreneurs testing zero-emissions business models in the field, which keeps the content grounded in what has actually been built. Biography highlights Founder of ZERI (Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives), established in 1994 at the United Nations University in Tokyo. Former Chairman and CEO of Ecover, Belgium; led the design and launch of the Malle ecological factory in 1992. Author of The Blue Economy: 10 Years, 100 Innovations, 100 Million Jobs, commissioned as a report to the Club of Rome. Elected member of the Club of Rome; served on its executive committee. Recipient of the 2022 Goi Peace Award; honorary doctorate from the University of Pecs, Hungary. MBA, INSEAD Fontainebleau; economics, University of Antwerp. Biography Ecover was a detergent company when Gunter Pauli took it over in 1991. Four years later it was a global reference point for sustainable manufacturing, operating out of a wooden factory with a planted roof in Malle, Belgium, the first of its kind. The experience also taught him that a clean product built on palm oil was still destroying rainforest, and that the green movement of the early 1990s had not yet confronted the problem. That recognition is what produced the Blue Economy. Working from the United Nations University in Tokyo, Pauli founded ZERI in 1994 to test a different premise: that natural systems already solve most of the problems industry struggles with, and that redesigning around local resources and cascading waste streams produces better economics, not worse. The 2010 report to the Club of Rome set out 100 worked examples, from coffee-to-mushroom cultivation to stone paper, each with a business case. The framework has travelled. The Blue Economy has been translated into more than 30 languages, taught on MBA and policy programmes, and picked up by governments in Europe, Latin America and Asia as a basis for regional development strategy. Pauli was elected to the Club of Rome and served on its executive committee from 2017, and received the Goi Peace Award in 2022. What he brings to a senior audience is a practitioner’s account of how environmental and financial returns can be made to move together, with a portfolio of cases that have been built, sold and scaled. The argument is not that sustainability is a duty. It is that most industrial processes are inefficient on their own terms, and the companies that notice first will take the margin. Key speaking topics The Blue Economy Nature-inspired business model design Zero emissions manufacturing and circular supply chains Sustainable entrepreneurship Regional development and resource strategy ESG strategy and corporate sustainability Systems thinking for leaders Ideal for CEOs, CSOs and board directors setting sustainability and capital allocation strategy Heads of innovation, R&D and operations rethinking product and factory design Government and public-sector leaders shaping regional development and industrial policy Investor audiences evaluating circular and regenerative business models Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Blue Economy framework and how it differs from recycling, offsetting and conventional CSR Named examples of companies and regions that have used nature-inspired design to cut cost and emissions at the same time A sharper lens for spotting waste streams and local resources that can be turned into revenue Language to use with boards and investors when sustainability investments have to compete for capital A reading of where sustainability policy and markets are heading over the next decade, drawn from Club of Rome and government advisory work

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.