Business Model Innovation

Why organisations work with Ola Ahlvarsson He has built, scaled, and exited businesses across two decades of European internet history, from Boxman in the late 1990s through Star Stable Entertainment and Epicenter, so his counsel on scale-up decisions is operating advice rather than commentary. He runs SIME, the Stockholm summit that has gathered C-level executives, founders, and investors annually since 1996, which gives boards a direct line into where Nordic and global tech is moving next. He co-founded Epicenter, a Nordic innovation hub now spanning Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki, with industry clusters in AI, longevity, food systems, and real estate, providing a current view of how corporates are partnering with startups. His advisory client list includes Google, Microsoft, Samsung, IBM, Ericsson, Telenor, and Schibsted, which signals comfort sitting with senior teams in regulated, large-cap environments. He works equally well as a keynote and as a moderator, which is rare; for boards designing high-stakes innovation summits, that dual capability is genuinely useful. Biography highlights Co-founder and former CEO of Result, the Stockholm-based business builder behind Spray, Spraydate, Sellbranch, and Keynote Media Group. Co-founder of Star Stable Entertainment, the Stockholm-based MMO studio behind one of Europe’s most successful children’s online games. Co-founder of Epicenter, the Nordic innovation hub operating across Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki. Curator and host of SIME, running since 1996 in Stockholm. Named «Top Ten Leading European Internet Entrepreneurs» by The Wall Street Journal in 1999 and a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow. Author of Mission Possible (Midas, 2005), Silicon Valhalla (2016), Happy Business (Aniara), and Mindchange (Fritanke, 2024). Biography European internet history runs through a small group of operators who built it from the inside. Ola Ahlvarsson is one of them. From Boxman in the late 1990s to Star Stable Entertainment in 2010, he has co-founded more than twenty companies and watched several through to acquisition, including Spray to Snowfall and Spraydate to Match.com. Result, the Stockholm builder he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO until 2008, was the engine behind much of that portfolio. Through it, and later through Keynote Media Group, he assembled a working knowledge of what scale, exit timing, and corporate partnership actually require. The Wall Street Journal named him among Europe’s top ten internet entrepreneurs the year Result launched. In 2014 he co-founded Epicenter, now a Nordic innovation hub with sites in Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki and clusters in AI, longevity, sustainable food systems, and real estate. He also curates and hosts SIME, the digital business summit he has run in Stockholm since 1996, which gives him a continuous view of how the industry’s centre of gravity moves. His written work brings a softer edge to the operator profile. Mindchange (2024) draws on his career and his parallel life as a karate and kickboxing competitor to argue that emotional control is a strategic asset for senior leaders. He has presented at the World Economic Forum, DLD Munich, World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, and Le Web in Paris, and advised Google, Microsoft, Samsung, IBM, Ericsson, Telenor, and Schibsted. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Digital transformation Innovation and corporate venturing Future of technology Business model innovation Self-leadership and performance under pressure Nordic and European tech ecosystems Ideal for Boards and CEOs designing innovation strategy or new venture units Chief Innovation, Chief Strategy, and Chief Digital Officers leading scale-up partnerships with startups Executive teams running annual summits or leadership offsites that need a substantive moderator as well as a keynote Audience outcomes A working understanding of how serial founders judge timing, capital, and exit, drawn from twenty-plus years of operating decisions. A current read on the Nordic and European tech landscape, including how innovation hubs and corporates are partnering today. Practical handles for installing founder-style decision-making inside a corporate operating model. A perspective on emotional control and self-leadership that connects athletic discipline to executive performance.

Why organisations work with Nirmalya Kumar He has run group strategy inside one of the world’s largest conglomerates. As a member of the Tata Sons Group Executive Council from 2013 to 2016, he was responsible for group-level strategy and customer centricity across Tata’s operating companies. His Marketing as Strategy thesis, published by Harvard Business Press, is the reference text for CEOs and CMOs trying to elevate marketing from a campaign function to a profit-and-loss instrument. Brand Breakout, co-authored with Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, codifies eight specific routes by which emerging-market brands take share from Western incumbents, including the Asian tortoise route and B2B-to-B2C migration. It is one of the few books on the subject grounded in named cases rather than generic globalisation theory. Private Label Strategy gives executive teams a worked playbook for competing with retailer brands, an issue that returns to the boardroom every time a downturn compresses margins in consumer goods. Thinkers50 Hall of Fame induction in 2017, the AMA Mahajan Award in 2021, and roughly twenty thousand Google Scholar citations place his work in the upper tier of academic marketing thinkers actively booked by industry. Biography highlights Lee Kong Chian Professor of Marketing, Singapore Management University; Distinguished Fellow, INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute. Member, Group Executive Council of Tata Sons (2013 to 2016), reporting to Chairman Cyrus Mistry, with responsibility for group strategy. Former Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School (2003 to 2013). Author of eight books, including Marketing as Strategy and Private Label Strategy, both Harvard Business Press; and Brand Breakout (Palgrave Macmillan). Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2017); awarded the Thinkers50 Global Village Award (2011); awarded the AMA Mahajan Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Strategy (2021). Board service across ACC, Bata India, Tata Chemicals, UltraTech Cement, and Zensar. Biography Marketing inside large organisations has been losing strategic ground for two decades, and the cost is now visible at the top line. CEOs see commoditisation, retailer power, and emerging-market competitors moving faster than their own brand portfolios. Kumar’s central argument, set out in Marketing as Strategy (Harvard Business Press, 2004), is that the answer is not better campaigns but a redefined role for marketing as the architect of customer-driven growth across the organisation. His subsequent work develops that argument against specific commercial pressures. Private Label Strategy, co-authored with Jan-Benedict Steenkamp at Harvard Business Press, addressed the structural rise of retailer brands. Brand Breakout, published as Western incumbents woke up to Tata, Lenovo, Haier, and Mahindra, mapped eight named routes by which emerging-market brands cross into global markets. Clash, on Amazon versus Walmart, examined the platform-versus-retail confrontation now defining consumer business. The work is reinforced by an operating record. From 2013 to 2016 Kumar sat on the Tata Sons Group Executive Council under Cyrus Mistry, leading group strategy across one of the most diversified industrial portfolios in the world. He has held faculty positions at London Business School, IMD, and Kellogg, and currently holds the Lee Kong Chian Chair at Singapore Management University. The recognition follows from the substance: Thinkers50 Hall of Fame in 2017, the Global Village Award in 2011, the AMA Mahajan Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Strategy in 2021, and a citation record above twenty thousand on Google Scholar. For boards weighing how to make marketing pay back its budget, his work is the operating manual. Key speaking topics Marketing as strategy Private label and retailer power Brand-building from emerging markets Competing with low-cost rivals Customer centricity in conglomerates Strategy and innovation in India Platform versus retail competition Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders seeking to position marketing as a P&L discipline CEOs and boards of consumer goods, retail, and industrial groups facing margin compression from private label or emerging-market entrants Executive teams in Indian and Asian conglomerates planning international brand strategy Strategy and corporate development leaders working on portfolio decisions and customer-centric reorganisation Audience outcomes A working definition of what marketing must control inside the organisation to drive profitable growth, beyond the campaign function A framework of named routes by which emerging-market brands take share from incumbents, with worked cases A practical view of when to fight, partner with, or build a private label, drawn from the Harvard Business Press study A Tata-scale account of how group strategy and customer focus get implemented across diversified portfolios A sharper read on the Amazon-versus-Walmart structural shift and what it means for consumer companies

Why organisations work with Nick Brackenbury A working answer to the visibility problem in physical retail. NearSt connects to point-of-sale systems and surfaces live in-store stock inside the platforms where shoppers already search, including Google and Facebook. Operating scale to back the argument. NearSt’s technology integrates with over 130 stock management systems and reaches over 800,000 retail locations globally, with Google as a named platform partner. Investor and partner credibility from inside retail and tech. Backers include Grosvenor Group, YYX Capital, Will Hobhouse of Heal’s and Jack Wills, and senior engineers from DeepMind and Google Research. A concrete view on where the high street competes and where it loses. Useful for retailers, landlords, and brands deciding how much to spend on stores versus marketplaces. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of NearSt, founded 2015, headquartered in London. Named platform partnership with Google connecting in-store inventory into Search and Maps. Total funding of approximately five million pounds across two rounds, led by YYX Capital and joined by Grosvenor Group, True Global, and Moscar Capital. Former Account Director at Ogilvy, working on Jaguar Land Rover, Nestle, and BP’s London 2012 Olympic sponsorship. Speaking platforms include RetailWeek Live, Wired Retail, eCommerce Expo, the British Retail Consortium, and Accenture events. Awards include RetailEXPO Innovation Award 2019, Get in the Ring Western Europe, RetailWeek Startup of the Week, and a London Book Fair Innovation Award. Biography A shopper looking for a specific product in 2026 starts in the same place: a search bar. The shop five minutes away has the item on the shelf. The shopper does not know that, so the order goes to a warehouse. NearSt was built to close that gap, by piping live in-store inventory directly into Google Search, Google Maps, and other consumer platforms. The company was co-founded in 2015 by Nick Brackenbury and Max Kreijn, both former Ogilvy account leads. Brackenbury was one of the agency’s youngest account directors, working across digital programmes for Jaguar Land Rover, Nestle, and BP’s London 2012 Olympic Games sponsorship. NearSt began as a same-hour delivery platform for London high street shops and pivoted into the infrastructure layer beneath the search engines themselves. That pivot is the substance of the speaking material. NearSt’s technology now plugs into more than 130 stock management systems and reaches over 800,000 retail locations globally. Investors include Grosvenor Group, YYX Capital, True Global, and Moscar Capital, alongside angels from Heal’s, Jack Wills, DeepMind, and Google Research. Awards from RetailEXPO, RetailWeek, Get in the Ring, and the London Book Fair sit on top of that operating record. For senior retail and brand audiences, the value is a working commercial argument. Physical stores hold inventory that online retailers cannot match for speed of fulfilment or sustainability of footprint. The constraint has been discoverability, not stock. Brackenbury talks about that constraint from inside the system that is removing it. Key speaking topics The future of high street retail Local commerce and in-store inventory visibility Customer experience in physical retail Retail technology and platform partnerships Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Pivoting a business model under pressure Ideal for Retail leadership audiences: CEOs, CMOs, and heads of stores at multi-site retailers and brands. Property and landlord audiences with high street and shopping centre exposure. Marketing and customer experience leaders weighing physical store investment against marketplace spend. Entrepreneurship and scale-up audiences interested in pivoting from B2C to platform infrastructure. Audience outcomes A clearer view of why local stock is the most under-used competitive asset in physical retail. Specific examples of how integrating store inventory with Google and Facebook changes footfall and conversion. A founder’s account of pivoting from a consumer-facing app to an infrastructure business, with the commercial reasoning. A working framework for evaluating retail technology investments against measurable in-store outcomes.

Why organisations work with Muhammad Yunus He has built the model he speaks about. Grameen Bank reached millions of borrowers, 96% of them women, with repayment rates above 95%, and became the template for microfinance in more than a hundred countries. His “social business” concept is operational, not aspirational. Danone, Veolia, BASF, Uniqlo, and others have launched joint social business ventures with the Yunus group under defined commercial terms. The Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games adopted his framework to open procurement to social and solidarity enterprises, with nearly 500 such companies in the supply chain. Milan-Cortina 2026 has signed a follow-on agreement. He sits at the intersection of credibility most speakers cannot reach: Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Congressional Gold Medal, and recent head of state experience as Chief Adviser of Bangladesh. His “three zeros” agenda, zero poverty, zero unemployment, zero net carbon, gives boards a single frame to connect ESG, inclusion, and youth employment work that usually live in separate decks. Biography highlights Founder of Grameen Bank, awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the bank. Recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009) and Congressional Gold Medal (2010). PhD in Economics, Vanderbilt University; former Professor of Economics, Chittagong University. Author of Banker to the Poor, Building Social Business, and A World of Three Zeros. Chairman of the Yunus Centre; partner to Danone, Veolia, BASF, Uniqlo, and others on joint social businesses. Adviser to Paris 2024 on social business and inclusive procurement; agreement signed for Milan-Cortina 2026. Served as Chief Adviser of Bangladesh’s interim government, August 2024 to February 2026. Biography Grameen Bank started lending in a Bangladeshi village in the 1970s, before microcredit had a name. The borrowers were women, the loans were tiny, and the orthodoxy at the time said neither group nor product should work. The bank grew to serve millions of clients with repayment rates above 95%, and the model was copied into more than a hundred countries. The economist who built it, Muhammad Yunus, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the bank in 2006. The work since has been about converting that proof point into an operating model that companies can actually run. Yunus calls it social business: a non-loss, non-dividend enterprise designed to solve a specific social problem, governed with the same discipline as a commercial business. Danone, Veolia, BASF, and Uniqlo have set up joint ventures with the Yunus Centre on that basis, on nutrition, clean water, and affordable clothing. His books Banker to the Poor, Building Social Business, and A World of Three Zeros are the reference texts. The Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games used the framework to open Games procurement to social and solidarity enterprises. Almost 500 such companies were brought into the supply chain. A follow-on agreement has been signed for the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Games. That is unusual reach for an academic concept. In August 2024, Yunus returned to Dhaka to lead Bangladesh’s interim government as Chief Adviser, following the student-led uprising that ended the Hasina administration. He stepped down in February 2026 after the general election. The detour matters here: he has now run a country as well as built an economic model, and he speaks from both sides of the policy and operating divide. Key speaking topics Social business as an operating model Microfinance and financial inclusion The “three zeros” agenda: poverty, unemployment, net carbon Inclusive procurement and supply chains Women’s economic empowerment Youth employment and entrepreneurship Corporate joint ventures with social outcomes Ideal for Boards and executive committees deciding how to structure ESG, inclusion, and impact work as operating units rather than reporting lines. Heads of strategy, sustainability, and procurement at consumer, industrial, and financial companies running joint ventures or supplier programmes with a social component. Government and multilateral audiences working on financial inclusion, youth employment, and inclusive growth policy. Foundations, family offices, and impact investors choosing between grant-making, ESG investing, and direct social business equity. Audience outcomes A working definition of social business that distinguishes it from CSR, ESG, and traditional philanthropy. Concrete examples of corporate joint ventures structured as social businesses, with the commercial terms made explicit. The Paris 2024 procurement model as a case study in opening a large supply chain to social and solidarity enterprises. A direct view from a Nobel laureate who has also recently led a country on what governments can and cannot do for inclusive growth. A frame, the three zeros, that connects climate, poverty, and unemployment work usually managed as separate programmes.

Why organisations work with Misiek Piskorski His proprietary multi-step framework reduces digital transformation to five or six sequenced decisions – giving leadership teams a replicable process to own and implement, not a theory to absorb and interpret. A Social Strategy (Princeton University Press, 2014) – the first book to use large-scale proprietary platform data to explain how companies build competitive advantage from social platforms – introduced three named diagnostic tests (social utility, social solution, and business value) that practitioners can apply to any platform investment decision. His transformation programmes are designed to span the full organisational hierarchy: CEO-level strategic advisory, top-team execution, middle-management education, and organisation-wide capability building – which means transformation logic does not stop at the boardroom door. As Co-Director of IMD’s AI Strategy and Implementation programme, he connects AI adoption directly to competitive strategy rather than treating it as a technology or operations question – giving executive teams a frame that boards can act on. Custom programmes delivered for organisations including Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, and the Asian Development Bank mean his frameworks have been stress-tested across industries and geographies, not built in one sector and applied to others by analogy. Biography highlights Professor of Digital Strategy, Analytics and Innovation and Dean of Executive Education, IMD Business School, Lausanne Previously Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit, Harvard Business School (ten years); prior faculty appointment at Stanford University Graduate School of Business Author of A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media (Princeton University Press, 2014) – winner of the Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal, 2015 Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, MIT Sloan Management Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award 2019, Organisational Development category, for the Siam Commercial Bank digital transformation programme Co-Director, AI Strategy and Implementation programme, IMD; Programme Director, Developing Digital Transformation Strategies (IMD online) Associate Editor, Journal of Organization Design; editorial board member, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and Organization Science Biography Misiek Piskorski spent two decades studying why digital transformation succeeds or stalls – working first at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and then at Harvard Business School before joining IMD in Lausanne in 2014. The answer, he argues, is almost never about technology. It is about the sequence of strategic decisions that determines how digital capabilities translate into competitive advantage. His book A Social Strategy (Princeton University Press, 2014) was the first to draw on proprietary data from platforms including Facebook and LinkedIn to explain the commercial mechanism behind social platforms. The argument – that companies must first help users meet social needs that cannot be satisfied offline before asking for any commercial return – won the Axiom Business Book Awards Gold Medal in 2015. Three diagnostic tests introduced in the book (social utility, social solution, and business value) give executive teams a practical tool for evaluating any platform investment. At IMD, his work is deliberately structured to span the full organisation. Custom programmes for Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, and the Asian Development Bank move from CEO-level strategy through top-team transformation projects to executive education for middle managers and digital learning at scale. As Co-Director of IMD’s AI Strategy and Implementation programme, he applies the same sequenced-decision logic to AI adoption – connecting implementation directly to competitive strategy. His research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, and MIT Sloan Management Review. He received the EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award in 2019 for his collaboration with Siam Commercial Bank on digital transformation, and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Organization Design. Key speaking topics Platform strategy and competitive advantage Digital transformation decision frameworks AI strategy and enterprise-wide implementation Social platform economics and business value Data analytics and strategic decision-making Digital business model design Organisational digital capability building Ideal for CEOs and senior leadership teams navigating digital transformation at enterprise scale Chief Digital Officers and Chief Strategy Officers assessing platform and AI investment decisions Boards and executive committees evaluating digital readiness and competitive positioning CHROs and Learning & Development leaders designing organisation-wide digital capability programmes Audience outcomes A named, sequenced decision framework for planning and executing digital transformation across the organisation – not a conceptual model but a structured process Practical diagnostic tools (social utility, social solution, and business value tests) for evaluating whether a platform or digital investment is likely to create competitive advantage A clear model for distinguishing digital activity from digital strategy – and for identifying where current transformation efforts are likely to stall Understanding of how AI adoption decisions connect to competitive positioning rather than remaining isolated as technology or operations questions A working vocabulary for the five or six strategic decisions that determine whether transformation programmes deliver at scale

Why organisations work with Michael G Jacobides He is the academic most directly associated with ecosystem strategy as a formal discipline. His Strategic Management Journal paper “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” is one of the most-read articles the journal has published, and is the reference point others build on. He gives leadership teams a working language for a question they keep asking badly. Are we an orchestrator, a complementor, or a component, and what does each role earn under AI. His policy work gives the room a regulatory lens most strategy speakers cannot offer. He served as Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy to the Hellenic Competition Commission and contributes to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. He has been ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top 50 management thinkers in four consecutive cycles since 2019, which is the credential boards recognise without needing to be briefed. His advisory base, BCG Henderson Institute and Evolution Ltd, keeps the content tested against live corporate decisions rather than against the conference circuit. Biography highlights Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Strategy, London Business School. Thinkers50 ranked management thinker in 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025; Strategy Award shortlist, 2019. Co-Editor, Industrial and Corporate Change. Author of “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” (Strategic Management Journal) and “How to Compete When Industries Digitize and Collide” (California Management Review, article-of-the-year). Academic Advisor to the BCG Henderson Institute; Lead Advisor of Evolution Ltd; contributor to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. Former Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy, Hellenic Competition Commission. Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and Forbes; commentator for BBC and CNN. Biography The boundary between industries is no longer the boundary between competitors. A bank now competes with a phone, a car company with a software platform, a retailer with an ad network. Jacobides has spent two decades building the academic framework that explains this, and turning it into language strategy teams can use. His paper “Towards a Theory of Ecosystems” in the Strategic Management Journal is the reference point most other ecosystem writing now builds on. The follow-up in California Management Review, on competing as industries digitise and collide, won the journal’s article-of-the-year and is widely used inside corporate strategy functions. The work is academic in origin and operational in use. That dual register is the reason boards book him. He holds the Sir Donald Gordon Chair at London Business School, co-edits Industrial and Corporate Change, and has been ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management thinkers across four cycles. He also advises the BCG Henderson Institute, leads the advisory boutique Evolution Ltd, and contributes to the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. His former role as Chief Expert Advisor on the Digital Economy to the Hellenic Competition Commission means he reads platform and AI regulation as a participant, not a spectator. What a senior buyer gets in the room is a strategist who can take an executive team from “AI is reshaping our industry” to a specific decision about where in the new value architecture the firm should sit, what it should orchestrate, what it should cede, and what regulators will let it own. Key speaking topics Ecosystem strategy and value migration Generative AI and competitive advantage Digital platforms and industry convergence Orchestrator, complementor and component positioning AI governance and competition policy Business model reinvention under digital disruption Boardroom strategy in technology-driven industries Ideal for Boards and group executive committees redrawing strategy as AI and platforms reshape their industry Chief Strategy Officers, Chief Digital Officers and Heads of Corporate Development assessing ecosystem positioning Banking, telecommunications, FMCG, healthcare and industrial leadership teams facing convergence pressure Private equity and investor audiences pricing platform exposure and ecosystem risk Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for ecosystem roles: orchestrator, complementor, component, and what each earns A clearer view of where AI shifts value inside the audience’s specific industry, not in general A framework for testing current strategy against the way industry boundaries are actually moving Sharper questions for the next board strategy session on platform exposure and regulatory risk A read on how competition policy and AI governance will constrain the playing field

Why organisations work with Mark Schaefer A connected, multi-book argument about where marketing economics are actually going, from Marketing Rebellion to Belonging to the Brand to Audacious, rather than a single talk track repackaged. A working position at the front of the AI-and-marketing conversation, anchored in his Rutgers “Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing in the Age of AI” and his book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. A serious thesis on community as a marketing asset, with case work on brands like Sephora, that gives CMOs a defensible alternative to paid-media-only growth plans. Direct consulting and keynote experience with global enterprises including Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Air Force, which means examples land for both regulated and consumer-facing audiences. A teaching habit, three years studying under Peter Drucker and an active Rutgers executive education role, that shows up in how he structures sessions: argument, evidence, frameworks leaders can take into a Monday meeting. Biography highlights Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, with consulting work for Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Dell, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, the U.S. Air Force, and the UK Government. RBS Executive Education Lecturer at Rutgers Business School; teaches the Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing in the Age of AI and graduate marketing classes. Author of twelve best-selling marketing books, including Marketing Rebellion, Belonging to the Brand, KNOWN, The Content Code, Cumulative Advantage, Return on Influence, How AI is Changing Your Customers, and Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Audacious launched with the first AI-driven Augmented Reality book cover and reached #1 in Amazon’s marketing category. Founder and co-host of The Marketing Companion podcast and publisher of the {grow} marketing blog. Featured commentator and contributor across The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, CBS News, BBC, NPR, Wired, and Harvard Business Review. Keynote speaker at South by Southwest, the Institute for International and European Affairs, Marketing Summit Tokyo, and Social Media Week London; has lectured at Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and Princeton. Named the third-most influential digital marketing authority by Brand24 in 2025. Biography The cost of reaching a customer keeps rising while the trust those impressions buy keeps falling. Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins set out the argument that built much of Mark Schaefer’s reputation, that businesses are no longer built on advertising impressions but on human impressions that help customers believe, belong, and find meaning. It is used as assigned reading at more than 70 universities and has been translated into 20 languages. That argument has continued through Belonging to the Brand, which makes the case for community as the next durable marketing strategy, and Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World, which examines brands like e.l.f. Beauty, HBO, and Giant Spoon to show how creative nerve, not algorithmic optimisation, captures attention in saturated markets. Audacious reached number one in Amazon’s marketing category and launched with what the publisher described as the first AI-driven Augmented Reality book cover. His authority is grounded in operating credentials, not commentary alone. Schaefer runs Schaefer Marketing Solutions and has consulted for Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Air Force. At Rutgers Business School, he is the Executive Education lecturer behind the Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing in the Age of AI, and he has lectured at Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and Princeton. He studied under Peter Drucker for three years, and the structural rigour of that lineage is visible in the way his frameworks are built. He also runs the infrastructure most marketing thinkers only write about. The Marketing Companion is one of the longer-running marketing podcasts in the field, and the {grow} blog has been a fixture in the discipline for over a decade. The result, for senior commercial audiences, is a speaker who treats marketing as a system and tests his arguments in public, every week, against an audience that includes practitioners and competitors. Key speaking topics Human-centred marketing strategy Brand community as a growth strategy AI in marketing and creative work Personal branding for executives and professionals Customer trust, loyalty, and the post-advertising buyer Content strategy and influence Cumulative advantage and competitive momentum Ideal for CMOs, brand directors, and heads of marketing rebuilding strategy around community and human connection. CEOs and commercial leaders questioning the ROI of paid-media-led growth plans. Heads of customer experience and digital who need to integrate AI without losing brand distinctiveness. Communications, PR, and corporate marketing leaders in regulated industries facing trust and credibility challenges. Audience outcomes A reframed view of where marketing value now sits: human impressions, community, and creative nerve over paid reach. Concrete case examples, including Sephora, e.l.f. Beauty, HBO, and Giant Spoon, that audiences can map against their own categories. A working position on how to use AI in marketing without becoming indistinguishable from competitors using the same tools. A clearer set of questions to bring back to brand, content, and customer experience teams about what they should stop funding. A vocabulary for talking to boards about brand and community as commercial assets, not soft costs.

Why organisations work with Kaihan Krippendorff He runs Outthinker, a working peer network of chief strategy, innovation and growth officers from Fortune 500 companies. The research that feeds his keynotes is drawn from sitting CSOs, not desk study. His IDEAS process, Outthinker Playbook, and 9Ps business model framework give strategy teams a structured way to surface non-obvious options. These are taught inside Wharton Executive Education, NYU, and FIU. Proximity, co-authored with Robert Wolcott of Kellogg, is the most developed business-side thesis on what just-in-time production, AI, and on-demand services mean for where value is created. It earned Thinkers50 recognition and a Next Big Idea Club endorsement. He bridges strategy and internal entrepreneurship. Driving Innovation from Within (Columbia Business School Publishing) addresses the operational problem of getting new ideas through a corporate immune system, the issue most CSOs actually wrestle with. Biography highlights Founder of Outthinker, a peer network of chief strategy, innovation, growth and transformation officers from Fortune 500 and large private organisations. Former McKinsey consultant; senior fellow at Wharton; teaching roles at NYU School of Professional Studies and Florida International University. Author of six books including Outthink the Competition, Driving Innovation from Within, and Proximity (co-authored with Robert Wolcott, 2024). Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2019; shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award (2019) and Strategy Award (2023). Host of three podcasts: Outthinkers, The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast, and Strategy at Scale Podcast. Contributor to Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. Biography Competitive advantage in most large companies is built on assumptions that quietly stop holding. The Outthinker network was set up to surface those assumptions early. It is a working group of chief strategy, innovation, growth and transformation officers from Fortune 500 and large private companies, convened by Kaihan Krippendorff to pressure-test where their industries are actually moving. Krippendorff trained at McKinsey before founding Outthinker. His doctorate is in economics and business; his engineering degree comes from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering, with further study at Wharton, Columbia Business School, and London Business School. He is a senior fellow at Wharton Executive Education and teaches at NYU School of Professional Studies and Florida International University. His published work has the same emphasis. Outthink the Competition sets out the strategic patterns disruptors use that incumbents rarely consider. Driving Innovation from Within, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, addresses the harder operational problem of moving an idea through a corporate immune system. Proximity, co-authored with Robert Wolcott of Kellogg, argues that AI, on-demand production, and digital infrastructure are collapsing the distance between supply and demand, and that this shift, rather than any single technology, is what redraws competitive position. He hosts three podcasts aimed at the same audience: Outthinkers, The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast, and Strategy at Scale Podcast. Thinkers50 has ranked him on its Radar list and shortlisted him for both its Innovation and Strategy awards. Key speaking topics Strategy under accelerating disruption Business model innovation Corporate innovation and internal entrepreneurship AI and the proximity economy Outside-in strategic foresight Chief strategy officer practice Growth strategy for Fortune 500 organisations Ideal for CSOs, chief innovation officers, and chief growth officers running strategy refresh cycles Boards and executive teams reassessing competitive position in an industry under structural change Corporate transformation leads building internal innovation pipelines Audience outcomes A clearer view of which assumptions underpinning the current strategy have already expired A working vocabulary, drawn from the Outthinker Playbook and 9Ps, for generating non-obvious strategic options A framework for thinking about AI and on-demand technology as a shift in where value is created, not a productivity tool Sharper questions for the next strategy offsite, informed by what sitting CSOs in the Outthinker network are actually working on

Why organisations work with Juan Senor Co-edits the WAN-IFRA Innovation in News Media report and the FIPP Innovation in Magazine Media report, the two annual reference works on what is actually working commercially across global publishing. Has advised hundreds of news organisations on every continent on the parallel work of rebuilding the news product and rebuilding the business model that funds it. Speaks with authority on disinformation, AI slop, and platform dependency from inside the industry, not as an outside commentator. Hosts the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the Reinvention Festival, with moderating credits at Money20/20 and the World Economic Forum, which means a senior commercial audience already knows him on stage. Biography highlights President and Principal Partner, INNOVATION Media Consulting Group, London. Co-editor of the annual Innovation in News Media World Report (WAN-IFRA) and the Innovation in Media report (FIPP). Former visiting fellow, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Former foreign affairs and defence reporter, PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour; team recipient of a DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award and Emmy nomination for interviews with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Former presenter and correspondent for CNBC Europe, EBN/Wall Street Journal TV, and International Herald Tribune Television. Long-running host of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity; moderator at the World Economic Forum, Money20/20, and the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress. Biography Most news organisations are now wrestling with two structural problems at once. Their commercial model has been hollowed out by platform dependency. Their editorial product is competing for attention against AI-generated content produced at industrial scale, much of it designed to mimic real journalism. Juan Senor has spent two decades inside that problem. As President of Innovation Media Consulting Group, he has advised hundreds of news and media organisations across every continent on the parallel work of rebuilding the news product and the business model that funds it. He co-edits the WAN-IFRA Innovation in News Media report and the FIPP Innovation in Magazine Media report, the closest the industry has to a running ledger of what audiences are willing to pay for. His authority on the editorial side comes from the desk. He spent seven years as a war and conflict reporter for PBS NewsHour, where the team’s coverage won a DuPont Award and his own work earned an Emmy nomination. He went on to present for EBN-Wall Street Journal TV and CNBC Europe and served as London correspondent for International Herald Tribune Television. He is a former Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, and is quoted regularly in The Economist and The Financial Times. He has also hosted the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for fourteen years and the Reinvention Festival for a decade, with moderating credits at Money20/20 and the World Economic Forum. That hosting work places him in front of the same senior commercial audience whose business problem he is now advising on. Key speaking topics Business model innovation in news and magazine media Paid content, subscription, and reader-revenue strategy Newsroom transformation and product strategy Digital disruption and the platform economy The future of journalism and trust in media Media leadership and editorial commercial alignment Ideal for Publisher CEOs, editors-in-chief, and chief product officers in news and magazine media CMOs and brand leaders rethinking owned-content and editorial strategy Industry associations, media congresses, and creative festivals needing a credible main-stage host or keynote Boards of content-driven businesses navigating subscription, advertising, and platform shifts Audience outcomes A current read on which paid-content models are working, with named publishers and live revenue figures A clearer view of what editorial leaders should stop doing, not only what to start Frameworks for aligning newsroom, product, and commercial teams around a single paid-content thesis A working language for board-level conversations about media disruption, drawn from the WAN-IFRA report

Why organisations work with Jonas Kjellberg He has lived the full venture cycle at the level most leadership teams only theorise about: founding member of Skype’s leadership group, head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik backing Zalando and HelloFresh, then founder again at NORNORM. The Gear Up framework, developed with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley, gives executives a structured way to diagnose where a business model will break before they commit capital. He brings the operator’s view on how Skype actually generated revenue and scaled commercially, not the founding myth. That distinction is what makes his sessions useful for boards thinking about commercial models, not just product. His current work at NORNORM puts him inside a circular, subscription-based business model with IKEA as a co-founder investor, which gives him a current case study on how subscription and sustainability economics interact. Biography highlights Co-creator and former member of the leadership team at Skype, with operating responsibility on the commercial side. Co-author of Gear Up (Wiley/Capstone, 2014) and Business Creation, with Stanford’s Lena Ramfelt and Tom Kosnik. Lecturer on entrepreneurship and sales culture at Stanford University and the Stockholm School of Economics. Former Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, leading roughly EUR 700m of investment into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh. Founder and Chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company co-founded with Inter IKEA, which raised EUR 110m in scale-up funding led by Verdane. Founder of Player:IO and former senior advisor at BCG Digital Ventures. Biography Skype was a small Stockholm team trying to work out whether voice-over-IP could ever be a real business. Jonas Kjellberg sat inside that team as part of the founding leadership group, focused on the commercial engine that turned a free product into a company eBay was prepared to pay for. That experience, of seeing exactly which business model decisions made the venture scalable and which nearly broke it, became the raw material for everything that followed. After Skype, he moved to the investor side as Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, deploying around EUR 700m into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh. That seat gave him a comparative view across consumer internet bets that most operators never get. He saw which models survived contact with real markets and which collapsed under their own assumptions. Out of that operating and investing work came Gear Up, written with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley in 2014. The book sets out a nine-component framework for testing whether a business model is actually viable before scaling it. It is now used in entrepreneurship classrooms at Stanford and the Stockholm School of Economics, where Kjellberg lectures on venture creation and sales culture. He is now back inside an operating business as founder and chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company built with Inter IKEA as a co-founding investor and now backed by Verdane in a EUR 110m round. For executive audiences, this matters because it gives him a live case study on subscription economics and circular business models, drawn from a company he is currently running. Key speaking topics Business model innovation and venture design Scaling consumer technology businesses Sales culture and commercial growth Circular and subscription business models Corporate venturing and intrapreneurship Entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for Boards and executive teams evaluating new ventures, spin-offs, or commercial model changes Chief Strategy Officers and Heads of Innovation responsible for new business creation Corporate venturing units and incubators inside large companies Founders and senior operators inside scale-up companies preparing for the next stage of growth Audience outcomes A clear way to stress-test a business model against the nine components of the Gear Up framework before committing capital A first-hand account of the commercial decisions that made Skype a scalable business, useful as a reference case for current bets A working view of how subscription and circular models change unit economics, drawn from NORNORM A sharper sense of which venture decisions are reversible and which lock the business in Direct comparison points from a portfolio that includes Zalando, HelloFresh, and Rocket Internet

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

Why organisations work with Jamie Anderson He brings a working academic’s command of strategy and innovation research, not a recycled consultancy deck. His articles sit in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and Business Strategy Review, and he teaches the material at Antwerp Management School. His Lady Gaga and contemporary-art case work is the rare strategy content that lands with mixed senior audiences. It is taken seriously by London Business School’s journal yet readable for a leadership team without an MBA. He has built and taught executive programmes at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, which means his frame of reference is global executive practice, not one country or one sector. He is a Case Centre top-50 bestselling author, with a Nespresso case among the global prize winners. Buyers get a speaker whose teaching cases are actually used by other faculty. Financial Times named him a “management guru”; Business Strategy Review placed him among the world’s top 25 management thinkers. The credentialling is from named bodies, not bureau description. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation, Antwerp Management School. Faculty and visiting positions at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin, and Indian School of Business. Co-author, The Fine Art of Success (Wiley), and author of the Gaganomics / Strategy Gaga case work. Articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal. The Case Centre Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors (No. 33 in 2021/22; No. 28 in 2020/21); winner of a global case prize for his Nespresso case. Named “management guru” by the Financial Times; listed among the world’s top 25 management thinkers by Business Strategy Review. Biography The classic strategy textbook assumed advantage was something a firm could build and defend. The leaders running large organisations now treat that assumption as a liability. The question is no longer how to protect a position, but how to keep generating new ones at the cadence the market demands. Anderson’s work sits inside that question. As Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Antwerp Management School, with faculty experience at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, he has spent two decades translating innovation research into language operating leaders can use. His articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are the same material he teaches in executive programmes, written for practitioners. The signature of his work is its source material. Where most strategy speakers reach for the same handful of case studies, Anderson has built much of his teaching from artists and pop-culture figures, most famously his Lady Gaga case (Strategy Gaga / Gaganomics) and the book The Fine Art of Success. Business Strategy Review named the Lady Gaga article one of the top pieces of its year. The cases work because the underlying strategy is rigorous, and the surface is readable for a non-specialist audience. The recognition is from named bodies. The Financial Times has called him a management guru. Business Strategy Review put him among the top 25 management thinkers. The Case Centre lists him as a top-50 bestselling case author across multiple years, which is the closest the academic strategy world gets to a market test of whether other faculty actually use your work. Key speaking topics Strategic innovation and business model design Sustaining competitive advantage in mature industries Creativity and the strategy of contemporary brands Digital transformation and customer experience Leadership for innovation Personal strategy and career reinvention Ideal for Boards and executive committees rebuilding the innovation pipeline behind a mature core business CSOs, heads of strategy and corporate development teams in large incumbents CMOs and CXOs working on brand and customer-experience reinvention Senior leadership offsites where strategy content needs to land with a mixed, non-specialist audience Audience outcomes A clearer read on why traditional sources of competitive advantage are eroding, and what is replacing them Concrete cases of organisations and brands that have engineered new advantage in mature markets A working vocabulary for strategic innovation drawn from current management research, not consultancy framing A perspective on creativity and brand strategy that connects to operating decisions, not just marketing Energy. The Lady Gaga, Madonna and contemporary-art material is the rare strategy content senior audiences actually quote afterwards