Behavioural Economics

Why organisations work with Marcus Collins He translates cultural anthropology into commercial decisions, turning ideas that usually live in academic departments into practical inputs for brand, product, and growth strategy. His book For the Culture provides a single thesis with named mechanisms for how meaning, identity, and belonging move markets. Buyers get an argument they can hand to a team, not a set of trend observations. He has run the work he teaches. Apple’s iTunes and Nike sport music, Beyonce’s digital strategy, Wieden+Kennedy New York, and named campaigns for Google, Brooklyn Nets, and State Farm sit behind every claim. Thinkers50 named him to the 2023 Radar with the Distinguished Achievement Award for the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. That puts him among a small group of new voices the global management community has formally endorsed. He sits inside the platform side of culture as Professor in Residence at TikTok, which means his read on how brand meaning forms and spreads is current, not retrospective. Biography highlights Clinical Professor of Marketing, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Professor in Residence, TikTok Former Chief Strategy Officer, Wieden+Kennedy New York Author, For the Culture (PublicAffairs, 2023); Thinkers50 2023 Best New Management Booklist Thinkers50 Radar Distinguished Achievement Award, 2023 American Advertising Federation Advertising Hall of Achievement; Ad Age and Crain’s 40 Under 40 Columnist, Adweek and Forbes Biography Culture, not demographics, decides what consumers buy and what they refuse. Marcus Collins built a career inside that observation. He ran digital strategy for Beyonce, worked on iTunes and Nike sport music at Apple, and went on to serve as Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York, the agency behind Nike’s most enduring brand work. His doctorate at Temple University was in cultural contagion and meaning-making, the academic foundation that now sits behind his book For the Culture. Published in 2023, it landed on the Thinkers50 Best New Management Booklist and won him the Radar Distinguished Achievement Award the same year, naming his thinking as the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. He teaches marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, holds a Professor in Residence role at TikTok, and writes columns for Adweek and Forbes. His commercial fingerprints are on Google’s Real Tone, the relaunch of the Brooklyn Nets, the Made In America festival, and State Farm’s Cliff Paul campaign. For senior commercial audiences, his value is specific. He gives marketing, growth, and brand teams a working theory of why some ideas move through a culture and most do not, and he ties that theory to operating choices about positioning, audience, and product. Key speaking topics Cultural contagion and consumer behaviour Brand strategy and meaning-making Marketing in a fragmented media environment The role of identity in consumption Building brands that earn cultural relevance Storytelling and business communication Customer experience and brand Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing strategy for a post-demographic environment Growth and commercial leadership teams trying to understand why their category narrative has stopped working Creative agencies and in-house brand teams looking for an applied framework on cultural relevance Consumer-facing businesses, retail, media, sport, technology, where brand meaning is a competitive variable Audience outcomes A working definition of culture that explains why messages succeed or fail, beyond demographic targeting A clear view of how meaning, identity, and belonging move audiences toward or away from a brand Named mechanisms from For the Culture that brand and marketing teams can apply to live campaigns Examples drawn from Apple, Nike, Beyonce, Brooklyn Nets, Google, and State Farm, showing how cultural strategy operates inside real commercial work A sharper sense of why most brand and growth strategies underperform in fragmented markets, and what changes when culture becomes the unit of analysis

Why organisations work with James Clear He brings the operating manual behind one of the most-sold business books of the last decade, with 25 million copies in circulation and a shared vocabulary already present inside most client organisations. His Four Laws of Behavior Change (make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying) give teams a concrete framework they can apply to execution, sales behaviour, safety, and performance the week after the keynote. He draws on behavioural science, not motivation theatre, which lands with technical and commercial audiences who have seen too many inspirational speakers. His corporate track record includes named engagements with Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, and Procter & Gamble, so the work has been stress-tested inside complex organisations, not only on conference stages. His weekly 3-2-1 newsletter reaches over 3 million readers, which means audiences tend to arrive already familiar with his ideas and leave with a direct channel to keep applying them. Biography highlights Author of Atomic Habits, #1 New York Times bestseller, 25 million+ copies sold, translated into more than 60 languages. Atomic Habits has spent over 260 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Writer of the 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter, delivered weekly to over 3 million subscribers. Keynote client list includes Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, Procter & Gamble, and Disney. His frameworks have been adopted inside teams across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. BA in biomechanics, Denison University (2008); inducted into the College Sports Communicators Academic All-America Hall of Fame, 2024. Biography Most strategy fails in the gap between decision and behaviour. Leaders leave the offsite aligned, the deck is immaculate, and six months later the teams are doing what they always did. Atomic Habits sold 25 million copies in part because it addressed that gap with a specific, usable mechanism, not another call to motivation. The mechanism is the Four Laws of Behavior Change: make the desired behaviour obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying, and invert each law to break the behaviours you want to lose. It is a simple vocabulary that scales, which is why it now shows up in internal decks at Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, and Procter & Gamble, and in locker rooms across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. The same language runs through teams that sit three organisational layers apart. Before the book, Clear spent six years writing at JamesClear.com, testing ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience against his own practice as an entrepreneur, writer, and competitive athlete. The 3-2-1 Thursday newsletter that grew out of that work now reaches more than 3 million readers each week. It is one of the largest paid-media-free newsletters in the world, and it keeps the ideas current, not frozen in 2018 when the book launched. For a senior buyer, the value is specific. Clear does not sell a mindset shift. He sells a framework for closing the execution gap that is portable across functions, clearly authored, and already circulating inside the company before he walks on stage. The audience leaves with something they can use on Monday morning and a shared language the leadership team can hold them to on Friday. Key speaking topics Habit formation and behaviour change Continuous improvement and the compounding of small gains Decision-making under uncertainty Behavioural design in teams and organisations Execution and performance systems Identity-based behaviour and culture Ideal for CHROs and heads of L&D building behaviour change into leadership and performance programmes. CEOs and executive teams running a transformation that requires sustained behaviour change below the leadership layer. Sales and commercial leaders looking to embed consistent customer-facing behaviours across distributed teams. Conference audiences of senior managers responsible for turning strategy into daily operational practice. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing why a desired behaviour is not happening, using the Four Laws as a diagnostic grid. A specific method for designing environments and cues so that high-value behaviours become the default, not the exception. A concrete view of how small, consistent improvements compound into outsized organisational results over a one-to-three-year horizon. A framework linking identity and behaviour that senior leaders can use when the challenge is cultural, not procedural. A shared reference point, drawn from a widely read book, that leaders can hold teams to after the event.

Why organisations work with Felix Oberholzer-Gee His Value Stick reduces competitive strategy to two quantifiable variables – customer willingness-to-pay and employee willingness-to-sell – giving leadership teams a data-driven basis for ranking strategic priorities rather than accumulating them. His central argument – that consistent outperformers do fewer things, not more things – gives boards and strategy teams a principled case for simplification that does not read as retreat or reduced ambition. The framework is designed to be cascaded across an organisation, not held at the strategy function level; it has been used in HBS executive programmes including the Harvard General Management Program and validated by senior practitioners including the CEOs of Michelin and Google X. His research base spans top-tier peer-reviewed economics journals (American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy) and two decades of HBS executive teaching, so the framework holds under board-level scrutiny and works in a workshop setting. As co-host of After Hours on the TED Audio Collective with Youngme Moon and Mihir Desai, he brings the same analytical rigour to live, public business questions – signalling a communicator as well as a researcher. Biography highlights Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration, Strategy Unit, Harvard Business School – member of faculty since 2003 Author: Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021) Creator of the Value Stick framework, taught in HBS MBA and executive programmes including the Harvard General Management Program Faculty Chair: Driving Digital Strategy; Senior Executive Leadership Program for China; Managing Turbulence – Harvard Business School HBS Class of 2006 Faculty Teaching Award (best teacher in core curriculum); 2002 Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award, Wharton School Research published in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Law and Economics Co-host of After Hours, TED Audio Collective, alongside HBS professors Youngme Moon and Mihir Desai Former faculty member, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; former Managing Director, Symo Electronics (Switzerland) Biography Felix Oberholzer-Gee has spent more than two decades at Harvard Business School making a counterintuitive argument: the organisations that consistently outperform their rivals are doing fewer things than their competitors, not more. His work is less a critique of strategic planning than a dismantling of the assumption that better strategy means broader strategy. The tool at the centre of his approach is the Value Stick, a framework he developed through research and refined through HBS executive programmes. It measures competitive performance through two variables: customer willingness-to-pay at one end, and employee and supplier willingness-to-sell at the other. The gap between them is the value a firm creates. Any initiative that does not widen that gap, his research shows, is a drain on competitive advantage rather than a contribution to it. That argument is the basis of Better, Simpler Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), endorsed in practice by the CEOs of Michelin and Google X. The framework is data-driven and designed to work at every level of an organisation – from board-level portfolio decisions to operational choices about talent and supplier relationships. Oberholzer-Gee holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich and has served in senior leadership roles at HBS, including chair of the MBA programme and Senior Associate Dean for the school’s global research centers. His research has been published in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, and covered by the Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. As co-host of After Hours on the TED Audio Collective, he applies the same analytical approach to business and culture questions with a wide public audience – extending the reach of his strategic thinking well beyond the executive classroom. Key speaking topics Value-based competitive strategy The Value Stick framework and willingness-to-pay analysis Strategic focus and initiative prioritisation Digital transformation and value creation Non-market strategy and competitive positioning Business performance in digital and disrupted markets Global competition and the Chinese economy Ideal for Chief Strategy Officers and corporate strategy teams choosing between competing strategic priorities Boards and senior leadership teams evaluating competitive positioning Executive education cohorts focused on general management and commercial strategy Leadership teams in digitally disrupted sectors reassessing the value they create for customers and talent Audience outcomes A single, quantifiable framework for assessing whether a strategic initiative creates or destroys competitive value Clarity on how to reduce strategic complexity without reducing strategic ambition A practical method for mapping competitive advantage through willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-sell Sharper criteria for deciding which initiatives to pursue and which to cut A common language for strategy discussions that can be applied consistently across business units and leadership levels

Why organisations work with Talya Miron-Shatz Trained directly under Daniel Kahneman at Princeton, with a research output of more than 60 peer-reviewed papers anchoring every commercial recommendation in published evidence. Translates behavioural science into specific design decisions on consent forms, patient journeys, adherence programmes and customer communications, not abstract nudges. Operating credibility with global pharma and consumer brands including Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, BMS, AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim and Samsung, where she has worked on advisory boards, customer outreach and behaviour-change programmes. Author of Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books, 2021), a book-length argument for why even motivated customers fail to act on the information they are given, and what producers of products and information can do about it. Biography highlights Full Professor, Ono Academic College, Faculty of Business Administration. Visiting Researcher, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge. Postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University with Daniel Kahneman; former adjunct lecturer in consumer behaviour at the Wharton School. Author of Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books, 2021); over 60 peer-reviewed publications on decision-making and behaviour change. CEO of CureMyWay, advising pharmaceutical companies, insurers and digital health firms on patient and customer behaviour. Senior Fellow, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, New York. Biography Most customer decisions are not made the way product strategy assumes. People skim consent forms, default to inaction, misread probabilities and disengage at the precise points a business model depends on them showing up. Closing that gap is the practical job of behavioural science in commercial settings, and it is the question Talya Miron-Shatz has spent two decades answering. Her research training came from inside the field that defined the question. After a PhD in psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she spent four years at Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow under Daniel Kahneman, then taught consumer behaviour at the Wharton School. She is now a full professor at Ono Academic College and a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge, with more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on decision-making, risk communication and patient comprehension. The applied work matters as much as the academic record. As CEO of CureMyWay she has advised Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, BMS, AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim and Samsung on how to design products, communications and customer pathways that line up with how people actually process information. Her 2021 book Your Life Depends on It (Basic Books) sets out the underlying argument: even highly motivated customers fail to act when the choice architecture is wrong, and the responsibility sits with the organisation that designed it. What this gives a leadership team is a behavioural lens with operating teeth. Pricing, product, marketing and customer experience decisions get tested against published evidence on attention, comprehension and choice, and the recommendations come back as specific design changes a team can ship. Key speaking topics Behavioural economics in commercial decision-making Choice architecture and customer experience Risk communication and information design Patient and consumer behaviour in healthcare Decision-making under uncertainty Behaviour change and adherence Wellbeing and the science of life satisfaction Ideal for Pharmaceutical, medtech and health insurance leadership teams designing patient and physician journeys CMOs, CX leaders and product heads in regulated consumer markets Strategy and innovation teams using behavioural insight to shape pricing, communication and service design Boards and executive committees commissioning customer behaviour-change programmes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for diagnosing where customer decisions break down and why Specific design moves to apply to communications, consent flows, choice menus and adherence programmes A clear separation between behavioural insight that holds up in published research and the looser claims of the broader nudge industry Evidence-based ways to align product, marketing and operations around real customer cognition rather than assumed rationality

Why organisations work with Nathalie Nahai Her psychological model for how digital persuasion builds or erodes consumer trust is grounded in a decade of published research, not reactions to recent AI headlines, which gives marketing and strategy teams a diagnostic framework rather than a new concern to manage. Business Unusual directly addresses the commercial consequences of values misalignment, applying the frameworks of self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism to the question of why consumers switch, stay and trust: with practical implications for brand, marketing and leadership strategy. She co-created TheValuesMap.com with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientifically grounded instrument that organisations can use to measure and communicate the values they actually hold, converting a strategic abstraction into a usable tool that survives the board conversation. She translates the ethics of AI and persuasive technology into a commercially legible argument that boards can act on, rather than a compliance burden that legal teams manage. Webs of Influence, published by Pearson and translated into seven languages, is used by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a foundational text on digital consumer behaviour, meaning her frameworks are often already the shared language of the audiences she addresses. Biography highlights Author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion (Pearson), translated into seven languages and adopted by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a standard text on digital consumer behaviour Author of Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, with named contributors including Dan Pink, Cindy Gallop and Amy C. Edmondson Co-created TheValuesMap.com (2021) with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientific values-assessment instrument available to organisations Guest faculty at ELISAVA’s Masters programme in Human Interaction and AI, teaching “Transversal Vision of Artificial Intelligence” Member of the BIMA Human Insights Council, the representative body for digital and tech in the UK Covered in and contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian and The Telegraph; hosted the Guardian Changing Media Summit Biography Nathalie Nahai coined the term web psychology in 2011, defining it as the empirical study of how online environments influence human attitudes and behaviours. At the time, most organisations had powerful digital tools and no psychological framework for understanding what those tools were doing to the people using them. Her book Webs of Influence (Pearson), translated into seven languages, built that framework into a practical text adopted by universities and Fortune 500 companies as a standard reference on digital consumer behaviour. Her follow-up, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, extended the argument into harder commercial territory – specifically, how organisations sustain consumer trust when digital markets, values and expectations all shift at once. The book drew contributions from Dan Pink, Cindy Gallop and Amy C. Edmondson, and applies self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism to the practical question of what makes brands resilient rather than brittle. In 2021 she co-created TheValuesMap.com with Dr Kiki Leutner of Goldsmiths University, a scientifically grounded instrument that organisations can use to measure and communicate their actual values. The ability to deploy psychology as a practical tool – not just a conceptual frame – distinguishes her approach from most advisory work in this space. Her analysis has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian and The Telegraph. She has lectured at Cambridge, UCL, Lund and Hult business schools and addressed major platforms including SXSW, the Web Summit and the Guardian Changing Media Summit. She serves as guest faculty at ELISAVA’s Masters programme in Human Interaction and AI and is a member of the BIMA Human Insights Council. Key speaking topics Consumer psychology and digital influence Ethics of AI and persuasive technology Values-led brand resilience Human behaviour and digital trust Eudaimonic consumerism and shifting consumer expectations Web psychology and online decision-making Behavioural science applied to marketing and product design Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams navigating the ethics and commercial implications of AI-driven personalisation Boards and senior leadership teams seeking a psychological framework for brand resilience and consumer trust strategy Digital product and technology teams applying persuasive design with ethical accountability Transformation and strategy leads working to align organisational values with commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A working model for understanding how AI and persuasive technology affect consumer trust and decision-making, grounded in published research rather than trend observation Practical application of self-determination theory and eudaimonic consumerism frameworks to brand, marketing and customer experience strategy A diagnostic approach to identifying where persuasive technology is eroding rather than building customer relationships Clarity on the commercial case for values-led strategy, with evidence from consumer behaviour research A set of questions to carry back into product, marketing and leadership conversations about how technology is actually affecting the people it is designed to serve

Why organisations work with Arnaud Chevallier His “Frame, Explore, Decide” process – the core of Solvable (Pearson, 2022) – gives leadership teams a shared language for problem diagnosis that reduces the organisational cost of premature solution-jumping; this is a named, teachable framework, not a consulting philosophy. His research on the five types of strategic questions – published in Harvard Business Review (May-June 2024) and selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 – gives executives a tool they can apply immediately to ambiguous, high-stakes discussions. His PhD in nonlinear stochastic mechanics, combined with strategy consulting at Accenture, produces frameworks that are simultaneously more rigorous in their evidence base and more usable in practice than most management academic alternatives. He has worked on genuinely complex, high-ambiguity problem-solving with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance), and Tetra Pak – organisations whose decision environments require structured diagnosis, not generic strategy advice. As director of IMD’s Global Management Foundations program and its Complex Problem Solving program, he brings institutional proof that serious executive audiences return to his frameworks at multiple career stages. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy, IMD Business School; joined in 2018 Author, Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Oxford University Press, 2016) Co-author, Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson FT, 2022), with Albrecht Enders Contributor to Harvard Business Review; “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions” (May-June 2024) selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 Director, IMD Global Management Foundations program; Director, MSc Sustainable Management and Technology (IMD/EPFL/University of Lausanne); Co-Director, IMD Complex Problem Solving program Former Accenture strategist (Houston and London); former Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Rice University; former graduate dean, University of Monterrey PhD in mechanical engineering, Rice University; engineering degrees, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Biography Arnaud Chevallier began teaching strategic thinking to engineers at Rice University – a combination that turned out to be revealing. Technically sophisticated minds, trained in rigorous analysis, still defaulted to the same error: they solved problems they had never properly defined. That observation has driven his work at IMD Business School, where he is now Professor of Strategy. His two books – Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Solvable (Pearson FT, 2022, co-authored with Albrecht Enders) – give executives a cross-disciplinary framework for navigating complexity: Frame, Explore, Decide. Both make the same foundational argument. Most strategic failures are framing failures. Organisations commit to solutions before the actual problem is understood. His research on decision quality extends to the questions executives ask. His article “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions,” published in Harvard Business Review in May-June 2024 and co-authored with Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux, identifies five types of strategic inquiry that consistently improve decision outcomes. The piece was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2026 – an editorial signal that the question of how leaders think has moved to the centre of the management agenda. At IMD, Chevallier directs the Global Management Foundations and Complex Problem Solving programs. His consulting work includes Shell, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance) – organisations whose challenges require structured diagnosis before any solution can be considered. Before entering academia, he worked in Accenture’s Strategy and Business Architecture practice across Houston and London, a background that grounds the frameworks in the reality of high-pressure institutional decisions. Key speaking topics Complex problem-solving frameworks Strategic decision-making under uncertainty Problem framing and diagnosis Cognitive bias and de-biasing in executive decisions Structured questioning for strategic clarity T-shaped thinking and cross-disciplinary problem-solving Evidence-based reasoning in organisations Ideal for Chief Strategy Officers and senior leadership teams navigating high-ambiguity decisions Transformation leads and strategy functions working through complex, multi-stakeholder challenges Engineering and technical leaders transitioning into general management or executive roles Executive MBA cohorts and senior leadership development programmes Audience outcomes A named, deployable framework – Frame, Explore, Decide – for structuring complex, ill-defined problems in real organisational contexts Practical tools for identifying problem misframing before resources and credibility are committed to the wrong solution A working method for recognising and reducing cognitive bias in high-stakes group decisions The five types of strategic question to apply in ambiguous, politically charged, or time-pressured discussions Sharper habits of structured reasoning that can be applied independently after the session

Why organisations work with Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes She brings the discipline of a long-term investor to the questions boards usually approach as innovation, strategy or M&A. The argument running through her work is that value compounds when capital, attention and design choices are aligned to long time horizons; few speakers can make that case from the operator, founder and investor seats at once. As Co-Founder and CEO of EdenMountain, she has built a marketplace around an entirely new asset class, Enterprise Non-Operating Rights, that lets companies monetise dormant intellectual property without taking on debt or diluting equity. This gives her examples of capital allocation that audiences have not heard from other speakers. Her thesis on innovation, set out in Architecting Interaction (BIS Publishers), translates directly into how she thinks about wealth and value: that lasting outcomes are produced by the contexts and structures you build around them, not by isolated brilliance. She works fluently across institutional and entrepreneurial audiences, from DHL, Guardian Glass, Saint Gobain, the European Commission and Dutch ministries on the corporate side, to the international value investing community at VALUEx and the World of Allocators. She speaks credibly to the behavioural side of long-term decisions: why patience, valuation discipline and time horizon are commercial advantages most organisations are structurally unable to use. Biography highlights Co-Founder and CEO of EdenMountain, the venture pioneering Enterprise Non-Operating Rights (ENORs) as a new asset class for monetising dormant intellectual property. Founder and CEO of AKKA Architects, the Amsterdam studio behind workplace and learning projects for DHL, Guardian Glass, Saint Gobain, the European Commission and several Dutch ministries. Author of Architecting Interaction: How to Innovate through Interactions (BIS Publishers, ISBN 9789463450478). Five years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam under Rem Koolhaas before founding AKKA in 2012. Active speaker on the international value investing circuit, including VALUEx Switzerland, VALUEx Middle East and the World of Allocators community. Multiple TEDx talks, including TEDxBelfastWomen, TEDxYouth@HNLBilthoven and TEDxAmsterdamED. Biography Most organisations are structured to optimise the next twelve months. Most investors are structured to optimise the next quarter. The discipline of designing for value that compounds over decades, in capital, in organisations and in the contexts that produce both, is the territory Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes has been working in for over a decade. Her route to it is unusual. Trained at the American University of Beirut and then at Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, she spent five years inside one of the most intellectually demanding studios in global architecture before founding her own practice, AKKA Architects, in Amsterdam in 2012. AKKA designs workplaces, public buildings and learning spaces for clients including DHL, Guardian Glass, Saint Gobain, the European Commission and a range of Dutch ministries. Her book, Architecting Interaction: How to Innovate through Interactions, sets out the thesis that runs through everything she has built since. Lasting outcomes are produced by the contexts you design around them, not by isolated talent or one-off effort. The same instinct now drives her work as Co-Founder and CEO of EdenMountain, the venture she co-founded around Enterprise Non-Operating Rights, a new asset class that lets companies monetise dormant intellectual property without debt or dilution. That intersection of operator, founder and investor seats shapes how she speaks to senior audiences today: on long-term capital allocation, on decision-making under uncertainty, and on the behavioural and structural conditions that let value compound across cycles. She is an active voice in the international value investing community, including VALUEx Switzerland, VALUEx Middle East and the World of Allocators. Key speaking topics Long-term value investing and capital allocation Decision-making under uncertainty Building value that endures: designing organisations and portfolios for the long term New asset classes and the monetisation of dormant intellectual property Behaviour, bias and patience in long-term commercial decisions Architecting Interaction: innovation as a designable practice Entrepreneurial leadership across architecture, fintech and capital Ideal for CEOs, founders and boards wrestling with how to allocate capital and attention against decade-long time horizons rather than quarterly cycles. Heads of innovation, strategy and corporate development looking at dormant IP and underused assets as a potential source of growth without dilution. Investor and family office audiences interested in long-term, fundamentals-driven approaches to capital allocation and decision-making. CHROs and heads of workplace responsible for offices and ways of working that have to produce more than seat efficiency. Audience outcomes A direct account of how patience and valuation discipline operate as commercial advantages, drawn from her practice as a private investor and active member of the international value investing community. A working definition of innovation as a property of designed contexts and interactions, not a property of individual talent, with the four-stage method from her book to test against. A concrete example of capital structuring in practice, through EdenMountain and the ENOR asset class, that audiences will not have encountered elsewhere. A vocabulary that lets strategy, innovation, capital and workplace functions argue for the same long-term outcome in the same terms.