Innovación y disrupción
Oradores que analizan cómo se transforman las industrias y cómo las organizaciones pueden liderar el cambio en lugar de seguirlo
Speakers Associates represents 390 speakers on Innovación y disrupción, including Kemal Apaydin, Michael Lyon, Peter Fisk, Neri Karra Sillaman, Mark Stevenson, Nilofer Merchant, Itai Green, Lucy Bullivant, Rita McGrath y Katja Schipperheijn.
Boards know they need to convert AI and automation pilots into operating advantage, but the path between policy ambition, capital allocation and a working factory or service line keeps stalling. Megatrends are easy to name. Translating them into a sequenced bet that survives a budget cycle is not. Leaders need a frame of reference built from inside the policy and standards machinery, not above it.
Most large companies still run innovation as a closed loop: internal R&D, internal pipeline, internal launch. The assumption that the best ideas must come from inside is expensive, slow, and increasingly wrong. The harder question is how to bring external ideas in, send internal ideas out, and build a business model that actually captures value from either.
Every competitive advantage a company holds will eventually be copied. The strategic question is not whether to transform, but whether to do so while still ahead. Most leadership teams wait for the crisis – by then, the gap is too wide to close.
Boards know AI is not optional. What they do not know is which of the dozen initiatives on the deck will compound into advantage, and which will sink six quarters of budget into pilots that never scale. The gap is not ambition, it is a repeatable way to decide where the organisation actually stands and what to do next.
Frontier technology now arrives faster than corporate strategy, regulatory frameworks, or supply chains can absorb it. Boards face decisions about immersive platforms, defence-adjacent tools, and contested AI applications with no precedent to draw on. The cost of waiting is ceded ground. The cost of moving without judgement is reputational and ethical exposure that does not unwind.
Most boards now treat AI as a strategic line item, but few know how to translate it into operating advantage without tripping the regulators, the workforce, or the customer. The gap between AI ambition and AI deployment is widening, not closing. Leaders need someone who has sat on both sides: the commercial side that has to ship, and the governance side that decides what shipping looks like.
Boards and executive teams are being asked to rebuild their businesses around technology while the companies themselves were built for a different era. The people making these decisions rarely have the dual fluency required: operator judgement about what a transformation actually costs inside a P&L, and board-level clarity about governance, risk and capital allocation. Without that combination, strategy decks multiply and execution stalls.
Adult play, trust and informal social bonds are quietly doing the heavy lifting inside high-performing teams, and most organisations have designed them out. Leaders want more creativity, better collaboration and faster adaptation, then run cultures that reward only output and certainty. The evolutionary evidence for how social mammals actually learn, bond and innovate rarely reaches the rooms where those cultures get shaped.
Large organisations know they need to innovate faster than their own R&D cycles allow. They have budget, scouting teams, and pilot programmes, yet most startup engagements stall before any technology reaches a revenue line. The hard question is not where to find innovation; it is how to build the internal structure that lets a corporate actually absorb it.
Most leadership teams have an AI strategy. Far fewer have changed how the business runs. The gap between stated intent and operating-model impact is where executive teams stall, and where the investment case quietly unravels.
Western brands keep treating international ecommerce as a translation problem. It is a channel problem, a payments problem and an ecosystem problem, and the platforms that win in China, the Gulf and Africa are not the ones that win in Europe. Leaders need to decide which marketplaces to build on, which to resist, and how to price the trade-off between reach and dependency.