Innovation & Disruption

Why organisations work with Peter Fisk He brings a structured framework for business reinvention. Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes drawn from deep work with senior leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas and Patagonia. Senior teams leave with a shared model to argue from. He sits in the rare overlap between marketer and strategist. As former CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and now Professor of Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, he treats marketing, customer thinking and innovation as parts of one growth discipline. Most organisations still split them across separate functions and budgets. He has worked with senior leaders across more than 300 companies in over 55 countries, with particular depth in Asian innovation and emerging-market growth. The case material is current and varied, not the same handful of examples a leadership team has already seen. As former Thinkers50 Global Director and founder of the annual European Business Forum, he has unusual curatorial access to the leading management thinkers in the world. Sessions draw on what is actually moving across the field. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of GeniusWorks, a London-based strategy and innovation consultancy Professor of Leadership, Strategy and Innovation at IE Business School, Madrid; academic director of the Global Advanced Management Program Former Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Marketing Former Thinkers50 Global Director; founder of the annual Thinkers50 European Business Forum Author of nine business books, including Business Recoded, Gamechangers, and the Genius series, translated into 35 languages; Business Recoded shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year Earlier commercial career at British Airways, including responsibility for the Concorde brand Biography The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the world’s largest professional marketing organisation. Peter Fisk ran it before founding GeniusWorks. He used the role to argue that marketing, customer and innovation belong inside growth strategy, where most organisations still treat them as separate functions. That argument has shaped his work since. His career started in physics, in a superconductivity lab. He moved into commercial roles at British Airways, including managing the Concorde brand, before consulting work at PA Consulting Group and Brand Finance. After CIM he founded GeniusWorks, a London consultancy, and joined IE Business School in Madrid as Professor of Strategy and Innovation. His 2020 book Business Recoded sets out seven mindset shifts and 49 codes for reinventing how a business creates value. It is built on deep interviews with leaders at companies including Microsoft, Adidas, Patagonia and Spotify. The Financial Times reviewed it as “the book you have to read now”. It was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. Through the Thinkers50 European Business Forum, which he founded in 2017 as Thinkers50 Global Director, he convenes the world’s leading management thinkers each year. Recent stages have brought together Michael Porter, Rita McGrath, Erin Meyer and Alex Osterwalder. That curatorial position is unusual for a working consultant. The frameworks in his sessions are continually refreshed by direct contact with the academics and practitioners writing the next generation of management ideas. Key speaking topics Growth strategy in fast-changing markets Business model reinvention Innovation strategy and execution Customer strategy and brand growth The Business Recoded framework: seven shifts for reinventing the business Asian innovation and emerging-market growth Sustainable growth and purposeful business Ideal for CEOs and boards facing slowing growth in mature markets Strategy and innovation leaders responsible for new business models or category growth CMOs and customer experience leaders rethinking how marketing connects to commercial strategy Executive leadership teams running annual strategy or transformation offsites Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the seven shifts that separate business reinvention from incremental change Case material from Asian innovators and global category leaders that most leadership teams will not have seen A connected view of innovation, customer and marketing strategy as one growth discipline Specific direction on where to stop investing, alongside where to grow

Why organisations work with Nilofer Merchant Her Onlyness framework offers a structural diagnosis for why innovation stalls inside organisations: not a confidence problem or a diversity problem, but a systemic filtering-out of unconventional ideas that the existing norms were built to do. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) names 24 specific norms – including performance reviews, servant leadership, and “move fast and break things” – that actively undermine the conditions for great work, and provides a measurable, team-applicable alternative for each one. She holds a position few speakers occupy: genuine technology executive experience (Apple, Autodesk, Symantec; 100+ products; $18B in revenues) combined with management research that Thinkers50 cited as among the five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years. She reframes the productivity and innovation conversation away from individual behaviour change – where most leadership speakers operate – and onto the systems and norms that leaders themselves control, which is a more actionable entry point for a board or senior team. Ranked by Thinkers50 as the “#1 person most likely to influence the future of management in both theory and practice,” her work carries both intellectual authority and practical application at the senior level. Biography highlights Author of four books on organisational performance and work design: The New How (O’Reilly, 2010), 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra (Harvard Business Review, 2012), The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017), and Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) Thinkers50 “Future Thinker” Award, 2013; ranked #22 globally in 2017 ranking; Thinkers50 Top 50, 2021; The Power of Onlyness shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award TED mainstage speaker; “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks Harvard Business Review contributor; media coverage includes Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and CNN Former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and GoLive; personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue across 25 years in technology Teaches business strategy and collaborative management at Stanford University and Santa Clara University; MBA, Santa Clara University Founder, The Intangible Labs; top 10 HR thinker, HR Magazine Biography Nilofer Merchant starts from an observation that most organisations resist: the management tools that delivered performance in the twentieth century are actively limiting performance now. From her position as founder of The Intangible Labs and author of four books on work design, she has spent twenty-five years building an evidence base for that claim, and an alternative. Her Onlyness framework, developed in The Power of Onlyness (Viking, 2017) and cited by Thinkers50 as one of five ideas most likely to shape business for the next twenty years, holds that modern value creation flows not from hierarchy or title, but from the distinct perspective that only each individual can bring. When organisations filter out that perspective through deference, conformity, and outdated norms, they lose the one input that capital and process cannot replicate. Our Best Work (HarperBusiness, 2026) takes that argument into the operational detail boards and leadership teams can actually act on. It names 24 specific norms – from performance reviews to servant leadership to “move fast and break things” – that suppress contribution, trust, and innovation, and pairs each with a measurable alternative. The argument is structural: the problem is not the willingness of people to perform, but the systems they are asked to perform inside. Merchant’s authority on this is grounded in operating experience. A former executive at Apple, Autodesk, and Symantec, she personally launched more than 100 products generating $18 billion in revenue. She has contributed to Harvard Business Review, been ranked #22 among the world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers50, and teaches business strategy at Stanford University and Santa Clara University. Her TED talk “Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation” ranks in the top 10% of TED’s most-viewed talks. Key speaking topics Organisational norms and performance systems The Onlyness framework and value creation Intangible value in modern organisations Collaborative strategy and execution Innovation and idea suppression in hierarchical structures Future of work and work design Culture change as systems change Ideal for CHROs and People leaders designing or overhauling performance and culture systems CEOs and senior leadership teams asking why execution consistently falls short of strategy Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads examining why new ideas fail to scale internally Boards and executive committees evaluating whether their management models are still fit for purpose Audience outcomes A named diagnostic framework (Onlyness) for identifying where organisational value is being systematically suppressed – and why Specific understanding of which widely adopted management practices are actively limiting innovation and contribution in their own organisations A practical model for replacing competition-based and hierarchy-based norms with trust and collaboration-based alternatives, drawn from Our Best Work‘s 24-indicator framework Language for the gap between what organisations currently measure and what actually creates value – useful for board-level and senior team conversations Concrete team-level practices applicable immediately post-session, drawn from the chapter-by-chapter practice model in Our Best Work

Why organisations work with Itai Green He runs the executive 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 forthcoming book with Business Expert Press, “Innovation or Elimination: Winning in a World of Constant Change,” 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 executive 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 headed 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). Co-Founder & CEO of “Global Innovation & Strategy Consulting”, since 2024. 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,” Business Expert Press. 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,” published by Business Expert Press, 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 Graeme Codrington The TIDES framework (Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values) gives leadership teams a named, structured lens for distinguishing structural disruption from short-term noise, something generic trend-watching rarely provides. His research on generational dynamics, anchored in Mind the Gap (Penguin), is one of the most analytically grounded treatments of multigenerational workforce tension available to leadership teams: it goes beyond labelling generations to explaining the mechanisms that drive the differences. Keynote insight does not stop at the room door: through TomorrowToday Global, organisations can move directly from a session to structured consulting and implementation, which means the analysis has a clear pathway to operational change. He is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: in South Africa and the UK/Ireland – an independently verified measure of sustained content quality across different professional and cultural contexts. His Seven Grey Elephants model and antifragility framework give boards a structured vocabulary for confronting the major forces that most organisations acknowledge but rarely analyse with discipline. Biography highlights Co-founder and lead futurist, TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm operating across 150-plus countries Author of multiple Penguin bestsellers, including Mind the Gap (with Sue Grant-Marshall) and Leading in a Changing World (with Keith Coats) Guest lecturer at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science Only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame: Southern Africa and UK/Ireland (Professional Speaking Association Award of Excellence) Global Certified Speaking Professional, Global Speakers Federation; Fellow and Honorary Fellow, Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland TEDx Top Picks 2021; speaks to approximately 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries Biography Graeme Codrington has spent over two decades arguing that most organisations are solving the wrong problem. The disruptions they face are not technical challenges requiring better execution, they are adaptive challenges requiring entirely new thinking. His co-founded firm TomorrowToday Global was built around that distinction, and around helping organisations act on it. Codrington is co-founder and lead futurist of TomorrowToday Global, a research and strategy firm tracking the disruptive forces shaping organisations since the early 2000s. His TIDES model maps five forces: Technology, Institutional change, Demographics, Environment, and Social values that drive disruption across any sector. His book Mind the Gap, published by Penguin, applied this thinking to generational dynamics and became a widely used text in leadership development programmes internationally. He lectures at London Business School, Duke Corporate Education, Cornell, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and speaks to roughly 100,000 people annually across more than 20 countries. His frameworks have expanded to include the Seven Grey Elephants (a structured analysis of the major forces leaders tend to acknowledge but avoid confronting directly) and an antifragility model that helps organisations move beyond resilience to building systems that actually strengthen under pressure. Codrington is the only professional speaker inducted into two international speaking Halls of Fame, in South Africa and the UK. He holds the Global Certified Speaking Professional designation from the Global Speakers Federation and is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Professional Speakers Association of UK and Northern Ireland. For organisations wanting to move beyond a single session, TomorrowToday Global’s consulting team provides structured follow-through from keynote insight to practical implementation. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futurist methodology Future of work and workforce transformation Multigenerational leadership and generational dynamics Adaptive leadership in disruptive environments Organisational antifragility and resilience Innovation culture and next practice approaches The TIDES framework and disruptive forces mapping Ideal for C-suite and board-level leaders building adaptive strategy for permanent disruption CHROs and people leaders managing multigenerational workforce complexity Transformation leads and strategy teams moving beyond traditional planning horizons Executive development programmes at business schools and corporate leadership academies Audience outcomes A working understanding of the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and practical tools for identifying which they are facing Familiarity with the TIDES framework for mapping the disruptive forces most relevant to their sector and strategic context Concrete methods for scanning the business environment for weak signals and translating them into actionable strategy Clarity on what the future of work means for their organisation’s people strategy, including multigenerational dynamics and AI integration A framework for building antifragility into their team or organisation, moving beyond survival-mode resilience

Why organisations work with Dean van Leeuwen His Grey Elephant framework gives boards a named, structured radar for seven megatrends – distinguishing the forces that demand a strategic response from background noise and positioning leaders to act before disruption arrives, not after His McKinsey consulting background means the output of his foresight work is strategic choices, not predictions – he applies commercial strategy discipline to futures thinking in a way that most futurists do not His book “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” codifies a three-quality leadership model drawn from case research on high-performing organisations, giving teams a shared model they can apply after the event He teaches in executive leadership programmes at Saïd Business School, Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau – his frameworks are tested against senior leadership cohorts, not developed solely for conference stages He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast, a named monthly research output that applies the Grey Elephant framework to live signals – keeping his content current and substantiated rather than recycled from a fixed talk Biography highlights Co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, a futurist and strategy consultancy operating across more than 50 countries; founder of TomorrowToday UK Former consultant at McKinsey and Company, with work that included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger Executive lecturer at Saïd Business School (University of Oxford), Henley Business School, and CEDEP, Fontainebleau Author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century” (self-published, available on Amazon) TEDx speaker MSc in Business Strategy, Henley Management College; undergraduate background in economics and law Named clients include L’Oreal, Anglo American, BNP Paribas, GSK, John Lewis Partnership, and Deloitte Biography Most organisations have access to trend data. What they are missing is a structured way to turn that data into decisions their boards will commit to and their teams will execute. Dean van Leeuwen, co-founder of TomorrowToday Global, has spent two decades building exactly that – a practical bridge between foresight and strategic action. His most distinctive intellectual contribution is the Grey Elephant framework, a proprietary megatrend radar developed by TomorrowToday and built around seven named forces identified as highly probable, high-impact, and consistently underacted upon. The framework helps leadership teams name the forces they can already see coming and design responses before the window closes. He also applies the BANI diagnostic – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – as a lens for teams operating in conditions where cause and effect no longer follow predictable patterns. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey and Company, where his work included advising on South Africa’s largest bank merger. That grounding in commercial strategy discipline is what separates his foresight practice from abstract futurism where the output is decisions and trade-offs, not trend catalogues. He now teaches in senior executive programmes at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, Henley Business School, and CEDEP in Fontainebleau. He is the author of “Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century,” which decodes what leaders at high-performing organisations actually do through a three-quality model grounded in case research. He co-hosts the “Elephants in the Boardroom” podcast with Graeme Codrington, applying the Grey Elephant framework monthly to live signals across geopolitics, technology, and the global economy. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and megatrend analysis Leadership decision-making under uncertainty Innovation as organisational capability Strategic transformation and competitive advantage The BANI operating environment Antifragility and organisational resilience Human-technology collaboration Ideal for Boards and C-suite leadership teams facing strategic inflection points, technology shifts, or competitive disruption Strategy, transformation, and innovation directors responsible for long-range planning Organisations navigating sector disruption, regulatory change, or structural market shifts Executive education cohorts focused on future-ready leadership and strategic foresight Audience outcomes A named framework for distinguishing megatrends that demand a strategic response from trends that can safely be monitored Shared language for leading teams in conditions where cause and effect are nonlinear and outcomes are hard to predict Practical tools for converting trend intelligence into decisions that commit direction and resources A clearer view of the specific forces most likely to reshape their competitive environment in the near and medium term Improved confidence in making strategic choices under uncertainty without waiting for conditions to stabilise

Why organisations work with Nikolas Badminton He brings a published, named foresight methodology to the room. The Positive Dystopia Canvas, set out in Facing Our Futures, is a structured tool for stress-testing strategy against scenarios leaders would rather not entertain. He has worked the discipline at scale, with leadership teams at NASA, JP Morgan, Disney, Rolls Royce, the United Nations, and the UK Home Office. The methods on stage have been tested in serious rooms first. He bridges AI capability and strategic foresight in a way few speakers can. Most AI speakers stop at adoption. Most foresight speakers treat AI as one signal among many. Badminton treats AI as the variable that breaks existing planning horizons, and shows leaders how to plan accordingly. He served as a key advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr., and his work is regularly cited by the BBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Fast Company. The audience tends to recognise him before he is introduced. Biography highlights Chief Futurist at Futurist.com, the international strategic foresight consultancy founded by Glen Hiemstra in 1993. Author of Facing Our Futures (Bloomsbury Business, 2023), JP Morgan Private Bank’s Next Gen Pick on its Summer Reading List and a Top-50 Business Book of 2023 by The Next Big Idea Club. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a member of Chatham House. Advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr. Research cited by the BBC, VICE, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Business Insider, Forbes, and Sunday Telegraph. Engagements with NASA, the United Nations, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Disney, Rolls Royce, Procter & Gamble, the US Department of State, and the UK Home Office. Biography Most organisations cannot describe the future they are planning toward. They have a five-year strategy and a quarterly forecast, with very little real method in between. This gap is where Nikolas Badminton works. As Chief Futurist at Futurist.com, the strategic foresight consultancy founded by Glen Hiemstra in 1993, he advises executives and government leaders on how to build anticipatory capability into how they plan. His method is set out in Facing Our Futures (Bloomsbury Business, 2023). The book gives executives the Positive Dystopia Canvas, a structured tool for stress-testing strategy against scenarios leaders would rather not entertain. JP Morgan Private Bank named it a Next Gen Pick for its Summer Reading List, and The Next Big Idea Club listed it among the Top-50 Business Books of 2023. The client list reflects the demand for that work. NASA, Disney, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Rolls Royce, the United Nations, the US Department of State, and the UK Home Office have used Badminton’s foresight work to inform planning that runs longer than the political or quarterly cycle. A Fellow of the RSA and a member of Chatham House, he served as a key advisor to The Age of A.I. documentary series with Robert Downey Jr., and his research is cited by the BBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Fast Company. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and futures design Artificial intelligence in the enterprise Anticipatory governance and long-range planning Innovation under disruption Energy transition and the future of resources Geopolitical scenarios and technology futures Ideal for CEOs and CSOs building foresight capability inside annual planning cycles. Boards and executive committees stress-testing strategy against long-range scenarios. Innovation, transformation, and R&D leaders responsible for moving beyond pilot stage on AI. Public-sector leaders and policymakers designing decisions with consequences beyond the political cycle. Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Positive Dystopia Canvas and how to apply it to current strategic decisions. Specific signals and scenarios in AI, energy, and geopolitics mapped onto the organisation’s actual planning horizon. The language to make the case for foresight capability inside a strategy function built around quarterly forecasting. Confidence to extend the planning conversation past 18 months without it becoming abstract or speculative.

Why organisations work with Andrew and Gaia Grant The co-presenting format is its own offer. The audience hears two voices working a leadership problem in real time, with the academic and the facilitator perspectives playing off each other. The frameworks come out of Gaia Grant’s PhD research in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. The Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) is an academically validated diagnostic, which matters when the work has to defend itself in front of a board or audit committee. They treat the explore-preserve tension as the actual problem. Most innovation speakers present innovation as a simple acceleration story, which leaves leaders without a useful answer for the part of the business that has to stay reliable. The thirty-year working partnership is itself the case study for the leadership content. Andrew and Gaia have built a co-authored body of research while running a global consultancy together, and that lived material reads in the room as something that cannot be performed. Biography highlights Co-authors of The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game (John Wiley & Sons, 2016) and the international bestseller Who Killed Creativity?…And How Do We Get it Back? (Wiley, 2012) Dr Gaia Grant: PhD researcher and lecturer in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School Andrew Grant: founder and director of Tirian International Consultancy and a TEDx speaker, with three decades of executive facilitation across more than thirty countries Developers of the academically validated Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and the Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) framework, used with executive teams from Fortune 500 firms and government innovation programmes Keynote work at YPO Global Leadership Conference, APEC CEO Summit, the PwC US National Conference, Gartner ITxpo, TEDx and the Salesforce ANZ Roadshow Clients include Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Disney, Salesforce, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Citibank, Visa, Goldman Sachs, UBS and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office Biography The hardest part of innovation is not coming up with new ideas. It is running the rest of the business while you do it. That tension is the central argument of two books co-authored by Andrew and Gaia Grant: The Innovation Race and Who Killed Creativity?. It is also the problem most organisations get wrong when they accelerate AI adoption. The research backbone is Dr Gaia Grant’s doctoral work in Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. Her PhD examined what lets some organisations innovate sustainably while others stall. Two tools came out of it: the academically validated Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP), both now used by executive teams worldwide. Andrew Grant founded Tirian International Consultancy and is the working other half of the research in the room. Gaia anchors the academic case; Andrew runs the live facilitation, with simulations, audience experiments and the kind of pacing that keeps a three-thousand-person Salesforce roadshow following the argument. The partnership is thirty years old, which is why the co-presented sessions read as a working dialogue, not a stitched-together keynote. The work has been used by Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Salesforce, Four Seasons and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office, often delivered with partner institutions including Duke Corporate Education. What gets repeated is the clearest signal of fit: roadshows that return, leadership programmes that scale, teams running iCLi diagnostics by the next planning cycle. Key speaking topics Innovation leadership and culture The explore-preserve paradox in AI adoption Sustainable innovation in complex organisations Creative intelligence and critical thinking Ambidextrous leadership Innovation diagnostics and culture transformation Ideal for C-suite teams running concurrent AI adoption and core-business protection mandates Heads of innovation, transformation and strategy in large, complex organisations Boards and CEOs designing a programme of cultural change with a long delivery arc Executive education and leadership programmes that need academically defensible content Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the explore-preserve tension that surfaces in every AI and innovation programme An honest read on where the organisation sits on innovation readiness, supported by the Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) A workable distinction between creative thinking and innovation execution, and where each is breaking down inside the audience’s own teams Visibility into which leadership archetypes in the room pull toward exploration and which pull toward preservation Decisions that hold up in a board paper because the framework behind them is academically validated

Why organisations work with Roger Spitz His background gives him unusual commercial authority. Before Techistential and the Disruptive Futures Institute, he led Technology M&A at BNP Paribas globally, where he advised on more than 50 transactions with a combined value over $25 billion. That record matters to boards and institutional investors whose advisers often lack operating experience. His book Disrupt With Impact won the 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards first place in Business and Enterprise, and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is used as a practitioner reference on strategic foresight. The AAA Framework (antifragility, anticipation, agility) gives leadership teams a concrete lens to apply to their own operating environment rather than another abstract call to “embrace change”. Techistentialism, the concept he coined, is specifically about human agency and decision-making under AI, which is the question most executive teams are quietly asking themselves about the technology their organisations are deploying. Institutional anchors at the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership and the AI Council of the Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence place him inside the forums his audiences either belong to or want to. Biography highlights President of Techistential and Chair of the Disruptive Futures Institute, San Francisco Former Global Head of Technology M&A at BNP Paribas; 50-plus transactions with a combined value exceeding $25 billion Author of Disrupt With Impact and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards first place in Business and Enterprise Non-Fiction Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership WEF Global Foresight Network member; AI Council, Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence Biography Traditional strategy runs on prediction. The trouble is that the systems senior leaders now operate in, AI, geopolitics, climate, capital markets, are non-linear in ways prediction cannot catch. Roger Spitz’s work is built around the alternative: a discipline of antifragility, anticipation and agility that allows organisations to benefit from volatility rather than simply endure it. His authority starts in finance. He was Global Head of Technology M&A at BNP Paribas, where he advised on more than 50 transactions with combined value over $25 billion, which is a different foundation to most futurists and is visible in how he handles boards. He now runs Techistential, the climate and foresight strategy advisory he founded, and chairs the Disruptive Futures Institute in San Francisco, where he coined the term “Techistentialism” to describe human agency and decision-making in an AI-mediated world. The body of published work is substantial. Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World won first place in Business and Enterprise Non-Fiction at the 2024 Chanticleer International Book Awards, and the four-volume Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption is used as a practitioner reference on strategic foresight. He sits in the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, ranks in the Thinkers360 Top 10 for Management Leadership, and serves on the AI Council of the Indian Society for Artificial Intelligence. For CEOs, boards, institutional investors and policy leaders, what Spitz offers is both specific and operational. The AAA Framework gives them a lens. The AI and techistentialism work gives them a language for what autonomous systems are doing to their operating model. And the M&A record gives them a speaker who has been on the other side of the capital-markets conversation they are probably also having. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight and the AAA Framework (antifragility, anticipation, agility) AI, techistentialism and human agency in an automated world Non-linear disruption and scenario thinking Geopolitical and technological risk Boardroom strategy under unpredictability Building antifragile organisations Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees revisiting strategic planning assumptions under accelerating disruption Chief strategy officers, chief AI officers and heads of corporate development Institutional investors, asset managers and private equity leadership teams Policy leaders and central banks running foresight and resilience briefs World Economic Forum and high-level industry forums Audience outcomes A clearer view of why linear forecasting is failing and what replaces it in current conditions A working grasp of the AAA Framework and how to apply it to the audience’s own strategy cycle Specific framing for human-AI decision-making drawn from Disrupt With Impact and the techistentialism work Case material from M&A, frontier technology and foresight consulting usable in the audience’s own sector Reference material from the published books that leadership teams can circulate after the session

Why organisations work with Louis De Jaeger He runs a working design practice, Commensalist, that has delivered regenerative projects from food forests and future-proof farms to vineyard hotels and private eco-islands, so the recommendations on stage are tied to built assets, not slideware. He frames regeneration as a financial proposition. Boards leave able to discuss soil, biodiversity and food systems as long-term yield and risk variables, not as CSR. He is one of the few sustainability voices who has also built infrastructure at scale, co-founding the Belgian night-train start-up Moonlight Express that merged into European Sleeper, which gives him direct credibility with leaders who care about how new green businesses actually get financed and operated. He brings a body of evidence from his own work: the FoodForest documentary, the book SOS: Save Our Soils, and over fifty opinion pieces in titles such as De Standaard, De Morgen and Knack. Audiences hear arguments that have already been pressure-tested in print and on screen. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Commensalist, a regenerative landscape architecture practice working on productive landscapes, regenerative farms and hospitality estates worldwide. Co-founder of the Food Forest Institute and of the ByeByeGrass biodiversity campaign in Belgium. Co-founder of Moonlight Express, the Belgian night-train start-up that merged into European Sleeper, now operating sleeper services from Brussels. Director of the award-winning documentary FoodForest (2022) and of the feature documentary Eat More Trees on the role of food forests in climate and food security. Author of SOS: Save Our Soils (2025) and of Design your own food forest, a technical reference on food forest design. Long-running opinion contributor to De Standaard, De Morgen, Knack, Knack Weekend and MO*, with more than fifty published columns since 2018. Biography Most boards now accept that climate, biodiversity and food security are material risks. Far fewer can describe what to actually do about the soil their supply chains depend on. Louis De Jaeger has spent the last decade closing that gap, designing the land and writing the case for it at the same time. He runs Commensalist, a Belgian landscape architecture practice that designs regenerative projects from productive farms and food forests to vineyard hotels and private eco-islands. The work is built, not theoretical. Clients come to him because they need an asset that will still hold value in thirty years under heat, drought and tighter nature regulation. Alongside the practice, he co-founded the Food Forest Institute and the ByeByeGrass campaign in Belgium, and made the documentaries FoodForest and Eat More Trees about the role of food forests in cooling the climate and rebuilding food systems. His 2025 book SOS: Save Our Soils sets out a direct argument that regenerative agriculture is the cheapest, most effective form of climate infrastructure available, and that current food and land policy is mispriced against it. What makes him useful in a leadership room is the second track. With Moonlight Express, the night-train start-up he co-founded that merged into European Sleeper, he has been on the inside of building a green infrastructure business from a deck to operating trains. So when he talks to investors and operators about regeneration as a long-term asset class, the argument carries the weight of someone who has had to finance, license and run one. Key speaking topics Regenerative agriculture and soil health Food forests and productive landscapes Climate, biodiversity and nature-based solutions Sustainable land use and food systems Regeneration as long-term asset strategy Sustainable hospitality and estate design Green infrastructure entrepreneurship Ideal for Boards and investment committees pricing climate, nature and land-use risk into long-term portfolios CSOs, heads of sustainability and ESG leads moving beyond carbon accounting into soil, water and biodiversity Real estate, hospitality and agribusiness operators evaluating regenerative design for their own assets Founders and corporate venture teams backing food, agritech and green infrastructure businesses Audience outcomes A working definition of regeneration that boards can use, distinct from offsetting and from generic ESG language. A clearer view of which sustainability assumptions and assets are likely to age badly over the next decade. Practical reference points from built projects: food forests, regenerative farms, hospitality estates, biodiversity campaigns. A founder’s account of how a green infrastructure business actually gets financed and run, drawn from Moonlight Express and European Sleeper. A sharper internal narrative for connecting climate, food and land strategy to commercial decisions.

Why organisations work with Michael Lyon He has mentored more than 100 ventures through the Creative Destruction Lab since 2018, currently anchored in the Oceans stream at the Atlantic site. That is a working accelerator practice, not a retired one. He was Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures during the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station (Tito, Shuttleworth). When he talks about commercialising frontier technology, he is describing a market he helped invent. He served as Special Assistant to FDIC Chairman L. William Seidman during the Savings and Loan crisis and as an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Few startup mentors have run a federal crisis at that level. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors, foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School and contributions including Professor Philip Kotler, gives boards and accelerator programmes a published reference point for what he teaches. He works comfortably in the Gulf Cooperation Council region and Asia, and has done business in more than 100 countries, which makes him useful for venture programmes thinking about international expansion from day one. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Lyon Capital Services; mentor at the Creative Destruction Lab. Former Vice President and General Counsel, Space Adventures; leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation. Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC and Resolution Trust Corporation during the Savings and Loan crisis; Assistant Director for Resolutions at the RTC. Former General Counsel and Director of Business Development at J.E. Robert Company; former attorney at Covington and Burling. Co-founder of Xtronaut Enterprises with the leader of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission. Author of Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors (foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal, Rotman School of Management). J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School; B.A. summa cum laude, Brandeis University; attended London School of Economics. Biography The hardest part of building a serious venture is not the idea. It is the cluster of decisions a founder makes about regulation, capital, geography, and timing in the first three years, almost always with too little information. That is the gap that Michael Lyon has spent two decades closing for founders, first inside the companies and now from the mentor’s seat at the Creative Destruction Lab. His commercial track record is in the part of the economy where regulation, capital intensity, and frontier technology meet. As Vice President and General Counsel of Space Adventures he helped organise the first private spaceflights to the International Space Station, the Tito and Shuttleworth missions. He held leadership roles at Zero Gravity Corporation and co-founded Xtronaut Enterprises with the lead scientist of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Before the space sector he was Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC during the Savings and Loan crisis and an Assistant Director for Resolutions at the Resolution Trust Corporation, working on failed thrifts of more than 500 million dollars in assets. He has also been General Counsel and Director of Business Development at the J.E. Robert Company and an attorney at Covington and Burling. The legal training is from Harvard, cum laude. Since 2018 he has mentored more than 100 ventures at the Creative Destruction Lab across the space, ocean, and emerging technology streams. His book Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors carries a foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal of the Rotman School of Management, who founded CDL, and a contribution from Professor Philip Kotler. It is the most direct expression of what a buyer is hiring when they put him in front of founders or a corporate innovation team. Key speaking topics Commercialising frontier technology in regulated markets Mentorship and founder decision-making inside accelerator programmes The commercial space sector and lessons from the first private orbital flights International market entry, with a focus on the Gulf and Asia Crisis resolution lessons from the Savings and Loan era Corporate innovation, intrapreneurship, and venture building Ideal for Founders and CEOs of early-stage ventures in space, ocean, and other regulated frontier sectors. Corporate innovation, R&D, and venture-building teams setting up accelerator or incubator programmes. Investors, family offices, and government innovation funds backing technology commercialisation. Universities, accelerators, and policy bodies running founder education at scale. Audience outcomes A working playbook for how founders extract real value from accelerators, incubators, and government innovation programmes. A grounded view of how commercial space and ocean ventures actually get built when regulation, capital, and timing are all moving at once. Lessons from the inside of a federal financial crisis applied to how founders and boards should think about risk and resolution today. Specific guidance on entering Gulf and Asian markets without burning the first eighteen months on the wrong structure.

Why organisations work with Alex Goryachev He ran the function he now talks about. Cisco’s global innovation strategy, AI programme launch and innovation centres on five continents were built under his direction. He gives boards and executive teams a working playbook for moving AI past the pilot stage, drawn from Fearless Innovation and codified into the global ISO Standards on Innovation he helped shape. He addresses workforce resistance to AI directly, naming the cultural and behavioural blockers that stall enterprise AI programmes, rather than focusing only on the technology layer. He bridges enterprise practice and the next generation of leaders through his Executive-in-Residence role at Tulane’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which keeps his frameworks tested against current operating reality. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Fearless Innovation (Wiley, 2020). Former Managing Director and Global Head of Innovation Strategy, Cisco. Established Cisco’s Global Innovation Centers across five continents and led the launch of its AI innovation programme. Executive-in-Residence, Tulane University Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Contributor to global ISO Standards on Innovation. Frequent contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and CEOWORLD; LinkedIn Top AI Voice. Earlier leadership roles at IBM, Dell and Pfizer. Biography Most enterprise AI programmes do not fail at the model. They fail at the handover, at the moment a promising pilot has to become a working capability inside a large operating company. That is the territory Goryachev spent two decades in. As Managing Director and Global Head of Innovation Strategy at Cisco, he established the company’s Global Innovation Centers across five continents and led the launch of its AI innovation programme. Earlier leadership work at IBM, Dell and Pfizer gave him an unusually broad view of how innovation actually moves through large, regulated organisations. That operating experience became the basis of Fearless Innovation (Wiley, 2020), a Wall Street Journal bestseller that lays out a practical discipline for converting innovation rhetoric into measurable results. The book sits alongside his contribution to the global ISO Standards on Innovation, where he helped codify the principles for how organisations build innovation capability at scale. He continues that work today as an Executive-in-Residence at Tulane University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and as a regular contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and CEOWORLD on the question that now dominates board agendas: how to move from AI as a slide-deck strategy to AI as an operating advantage. Key speaking topics Enterprise AI strategy and operational deployment Innovation as a managed discipline AI literacy and workforce readiness Digital transformation in large enterprises Leadership in an AI-first operating model Culture change and innovation behaviour Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting an AI agenda beyond proof-of-concept Chief Innovation, Strategy and Transformation Officers responsible for translating AI ambition into operating results CHROs and learning leaders rebuilding workforce capability for an AI-first business Executive teams in Fortune 500s, scale-ups and government bodies stalled at the pilot stage of AI Audience outcomes A clear view of the difference between AI experimentation and AI as an operating capability, with named markers of each. Specific patterns from inside Cisco’s innovation programme that audiences can map onto their own organisations. A direct read on where workforce resistance to AI typically appears, and what leaders can do about it. A working sense of what Fearless Innovation prescribes as the discipline behind sustained innovation results.

Why organisations work with Rita McGrath The transient advantage framework directly challenges an assumption most leadership teams still operate on: that the goal of strategy is to build and protect durable competitive positions. McGrath makes the cost of that assumption explicit, and offers a named, practitioner-tested alternative. Discovery-driven planning, co-created with Ian C. MacMillan and introduced through the Harvard Business Review, gives organisations a structured methodology for committing to uncertain growth initiatives: one that Clayton Christensen described as among the most important management tools ever developed. She holds the Thinkers50 #1 Strategy Award (2013) alongside four subsequent Thinkers50 Strategy Awards and a 2025 global ranking of #6, a record of credentials in strategy thinking that is without parallel on the conference circuit. Her Seeing Around Corners framework provides a concrete vocabulary for the specific problem boards face most acutely: detecting the leading indicators of strategic inflection before they become corporate crises. As a regular HBR contributor whose work is cited in the FT, WSJ, and New York Times, her ideas arrive in board rooms before she does: senior audiences already speak her language. Biography highlights Professor of Management and Academic Director in Executive Education, Columbia Business School; leads Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy (2013); five-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award winner; ranked #6 globally on the Thinkers50 overall list (2025) C.K. Prahalad Award (2022), Strategic Management Society: awarded for scholarly impact on practice; inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame (2022) Author of five books including The End of Competitive Advantage (HBR Press) and Seeing Around Corners (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Discovery-Driven Growth named to Thinkers50 Management Classics Booklist Co-creator of discovery-driven planning, introduced through the Harvard Business Review (1995); cited by Clayton Christensen as among the most important management and strategy tools ever developed Ph.D., Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania); honours degrees from Barnard College and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Work covered by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, CNN Business, and NPR Marketplace; one of HBR’s most frequent contributors Biography Competitive advantage used to be the organising idea behind business strategy. Build it, protect it, sustain it. In markets defined by rapid technology cycles, boundary-free competition, and compressing product lifecycles, that idea has become a liability, and most organisations do not realise it until the decision has already been made for them. Rita Gunther McGrath has spent three decades at Columbia Business School building the alternative. Her framework of transient advantage, set out in The End of Competitive Advantage, argues that the objective of strategy must shift from sustaining positions to developing the organisational capacity to find, exploit, and exit advantages on the organisation’s own terms. Discovery-driven planning provides the operational methodology: a structured process for committing to growth initiatives under uncertainty without betting the business on invalid assumptions. Her intellectual standing in strategy is well-documented. Thinkers50 awarded her the #1 Strategy Award in 2013 and has continued to recognise her work across four subsequent award cycles, ranking her sixth globally in 2025. The Strategic Management Society’s C.K. Prahalad Award (2022) recognised her scholarly impact on practice, a distinction that acknowledges both rigour and application. Clayton Christensen placed her discovery-driven growth tools among the most important management tools ever developed. McGrath directs Columbia’s Leading Strategic Growth and Change executive programme and founded Valize, a platform that operationalises the discovery-driven methodology for organisations at scale. Her advisory work runs into the C-suites of Fortune 1,000 companies: helping boards and senior leadership teams navigate the specific transition her research describes: from the strategy they were trained to run, to one that fits the market they are actually in. Key speaking topics Transient advantage and the limits of competitive positioning Strategic inflection points and early warning signals Discovery-driven planning and growth under uncertainty Business model evolution and renewal Organisational agility in volatile markets Strategic decision-making under ambiguity Innovation as a managed, repeatable discipline Ideal for CEOs, CSOs, and board members wrestling with strategy refresh in disrupted or fast-moving sectors Strategy and corporate development teams whose existing planning frameworks are producing diminishing returns Senior leadership teams in large incumbents facing the transition from mature to declining competitive positions Executive education participants on leadership programmes where strategic thinking is the primary development objective Audience outcomes A clear understanding of why durable competitive advantage is an increasingly dangerous strategic objective, and what to replace it with Practical command of the discovery-driven planning process for evaluating and resourcing uncertain growth initiatives A named framework for identifying strategic inflection points before they become visible to the wider market Language and tools to initiate an honest internal conversation about which parts of the current business model are in decline Sharpened criteria for strategic resource allocation when outcomes cannot be forecast with confidence