Business Model Innovation speakers

Why organisations work with Paul Polman A ten-year CEO run at Unilever with documented results. Shareholder returns rose 290 percent while the company held the top global sustainability ranking, ended quarterly earnings guidance on day one, and defeated Kraft Heinz’s 143 billion dollar hostile takeover bid in 2017. Ranked first in the world. In 2025 Thinkers50 placed Polman and Andrew Winston first in its biennial list of the most influential management thinkers, the field’s most authoritative ranking. Co-architect of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as one of 27 members of Ban Ki-moon’s High Level Panel. He helped build the framework boards now report against. A direct read on how long-term capital and global institutions weigh sustainability. Polman advises Temasek and the World Trade Organization and sits on the boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Climate Foundation. Net Positive, his book with Andrew Winston, was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Year and won the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. Biography highlights CEO of Unilever, 2009 to 2019. Succeeded Patrick Cescau and was succeeded by Alan Jope. 27 years at Procter & Gamble, rising to Group President for Europe. Then Chief Financial Officer at Nestlé from 2006 and Head of the Americas from 2008. Member of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s High Level Panel that developed the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Continues as a UN SDG Advocate. Chair of The Valuable 500 and One Young World, co-chair of the Planetary Guardians, and co-founder and Chair Emeritus of IMAGINE. Board member of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and the European Climate Foundation, and adviser to the World Trade Organization and Temasek. Former Chair of Oxford Saïd Business School (2019 to 2025) and former Vice-Chair of the UN Global Compact (to June 2024). Co-author of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take (2021), a Financial Times Business Book of the Year and Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award winner. Ranked first in the 2025 Thinkers50 list with Andrew Winston. Recipient of a UK Knighthood, France’s Légion d’honneur and the UN’s highest environmental honour. Biography Between 2009 and 2019, Unilever delivered a 290 percent shareholder return while holding the top global sustainability ranking and the title of one of the world’s best places to work. The period included the defeat of a $143 billion hostile bid from Kraft Heinz in 2017. The decade is the empirical case sitting underneath everything Paul Polman argues about business today. He wrote the case up with Andrew Winston. Net Positive, published in 2021, argues that companies should improve the wellbeing of everyone they affect, including the planet, and build financial strength in the process. The Financial Times named it a Business Book of the Year, and Thinkers50 gave it the Breakthrough Idea Award the same year. Polman’s operator background predates Unilever. He spent 27 years at Procter & Gamble, rising to Group President for Europe, before joining Nestlé as Chief Financial Officer in 2006. That background matters to the argument. The book comes from someone who ran the P&L while making the sustainability case. Today Polman advises CEOs, boards and investors on long-term value creation and systems change. He co-chairs the Planetary Guardians, chairs The Valuable 500, and sits on the boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Climate Foundation. He advises the World Trade Organization and Temasek. In 2025, Thinkers50 placed him and Andrew Winston first in its biennial ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers. Key speaking topics Sustainable business and the Net Positive framework Purpose-driven leadership and long-term value creation Sustainability as commercial strategy Climate change and the role of business The UN Sustainable Development Goals Corporate governance and stakeholder capitalism Systems change and industry coalitions Ideal for Boards and executive teams weighing whether to hardwire long-term and sustainability commitments into strategy as a commercial decision, not a reputational one. CEOs and strategy leads under pressure to deliver near-term growth while defending long-term investment and stakeholder trust. CFOs, investors and IR teams making the commercial case for long-term value creation against short-term capital-markets pressure. Governments, multilateral bodies and business coalitions working on public-private collaboration and systems change. Audience outcomes The empirical case, with the Unilever numbers, for why purpose-driven models outperform shareholder-primacy ones over a decade. A sharper line between sustainability as compliance cost and sustainability as commercial strategy, and how boards tell the difference in practice. The Net Positive model: how a company profits by solving the world’s problems instead of creating them, and builds value for shareholders and society while doing it. A working reframe of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as commercial opportunity, grounded in the industry coalitions Polman has helped build. The operator’s view on defending long-term strategy to activist investors, drawn from the defeat of the Kraft Heinz takeover and the decision to end quarterly earnings guidance.

Why organisations work with Phil Spencer 25 unbroken years on a flagship Channel 4 show means audiences recognise Phil Spencer before he walks on. Few hosts in UK broadcasting can match that level of advanced familiarity. He moves between hosting and substance. Spencer founded Garrington Home Finders in 1996, one of the first UK property businesses built around buyer advocacy, and has since built two further businesses, including Move iQ. His past corporate hosting credits include British Gas, HM Land Registry and Norwich Union. Bureau testimonials repeatedly point to his ability to hold difficult rooms without losing them. Property is the obvious entry point, but the wider relevance is consumer trust in markets structured around the seller. That makes him useful to financial services, mortgage providers, insurers and housebuilders looking for a credible voice on customer-side decisions. The MBE awarded in the 2026 New Year Honours, for nineteen years of patronage at homelessness charity St Mungo’s, adds reputational gravity to the broadcasting credit. Biography highlights Co-presenter of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location since 2000 with Kirstie Allsopp, across 44 series and counting. Founder of Garrington Home Finders (1996), one of the first UK property buying agencies built around buyer-side representation. Co-founder of Raise the Roof Productions (2010), now a major independent supplier to Channel 4, based in Glasgow. Founder of Move iQ (2018), the consumer property advice platform with a podcast, YouTube channel and Property Report tool. Awarded MBE in the 2026 New Year Honours for charitable services, recognised for nineteen years of patronage at homelessness charity St Mungo’s. Author of three Vermilion-published property books: How to Buy a House (with Kirstie Allsopp), Adding Value to Your Home, and How to Buy Your First Home. Biography Most consumer property markets are organised around the seller. Estate agents are paid by vendors and conveyancers work transaction by transaction. The buyer walks into the largest financial decision of their life without anyone professionally obliged to represent them. Phil Spencer founded Garrington Home Finders in 1996 after qualifying as a surveyor at London South Bank University. The business grew to four offices, thirty staff and £3.5m annual turnover before he stepped back in 2008. The buyer-agent model has since been widely copied across the UK property industry. Television came almost by accident. A Scottish production company looking for a property consultant on a new format invited him to screen-test as a presenter. Location, Location, Location launched in 2000 with Kirstie Allsopp and is now in its 44th series, the longest-running property programme in British television. The two later founded Raise the Roof Productions, now a major independent supplier to Channel 4, based in Glasgow. For corporate audiences, the proposition is unusual. Twenty-five years of continuous broadcasting give Spencer the immediate audience recognition that hosting demands. Three businesses sit behind the screen: Garrington in 1996, Raise the Roof in 2010, and Move iQ in 2018. The MBE in the 2026 New Year Honours, for nineteen years of patronage at homelessness charity St Mungo’s, adds a public-service credit beyond the broadcasting career. Key speaking topics The UK property market and the buyer’s journey Consumer-side business models in seller-led markets Entrepreneurship and category creation Awards hosting and conference facilitation Independent television production Career storytelling from Location, Location, Location Ideal for Property and housebuilding businesses running customer or industry events Mortgage providers, insurers and consumer financial services firms hosting client and broker conferences Awards programmes and industry recognition ceremonies that need a confident broadcast host Conference organisers booking after-dinner speakers with an entrepreneurial story behind the broadcasting credit Audience outcomes The Garrington story: how a category-defining property business was built around buyer advocacy in a seller-led market Honest commentary on the UK property market that goes beyond the news cycle into transaction-level dynamics How Move iQ was built as a consumer media platform inside an established broadcasting career A confidently held event programme with the pacing of British broadcast television

Why organisations work with Philippe Starck He has redefined entire categories through design, not decorated them. The Delano in Miami did not improve hotels, it created the boutique-hotel format that Ian Schrager built a global business on. The Louis Ghost chair sold over a million units by reimagining what mass-produced furniture could look like. His “democratic design” doctrine reframes design as a commercial and ethical question rather than an aesthetic one. The argument that quality belongs at the lowest possible price, not the highest, is directly useful to organisations rethinking product strategy and customer access. He works at every scale a business cares about. Hospitality interiors for Royalton, Mondrian, Sanderson, Le Meurice. Industrial products for Alessi, Kartell, Microsoft, Vitra. Bathroom systems for Hansgrohe AXOR since 1994. Few speakers have applied a single design philosophy across that many sectors and lived to argue for it. He brings a working creator’s view of innovation, including recent collaborations on AI-designed furniture with Kartell and Autodesk, and architectural work on the Axiom space station. He speaks about where design is heading from inside the work, not from outside it. Biography highlights Designed the private apartments of President François Mitterrand at the Élysée Palace and the Café Costes in Paris, the two commissions that established his international reputation. Created the boutique-hotel category with the Delano Miami in collaboration with Ian Schrager, followed by Royalton, Paramount, Mondrian, Hudson, Sanderson, St Martin’s Lane, and Le Meurice. Iconic industrial designs include the Juicy Salif citrus reamer for Alessi, the Louis Ghost chair for Kartell (over one million units sold), the Costes chair, the Microsoft Optical Mouse, and the AXOR bathroom collections for Hansgrohe. First French speaker invited to a TED conference; his 2007 talk “Design and destiny” remains one of the platform’s most viewed design lectures. Knight of the Legion of Honour, Officer of Arts and Letters, recipient of the D&AD President’s Award, the Harvard Excellence in Design Award, and the Grand Prix National de la Création Industrielle, among more than 100 international awards. Appointed artistic director for the French presidency of the European Union in 2008, and Ambassador of Creativity and Innovation in 2009. Biography The Delano in Miami opened in 1995 and changed the economics of hospitality. Before it, hotels competed on stars, location, and service. After it, hotels competed on atmosphere and identity. The boutique-hotel category, now a global multi-billion-dollar segment, was built on a single project that Philippe Starck designed for Ian Schrager. The lesson, for any business that thinks design is a finishing layer, is that one designed space can create a market. That pattern, design that creates rather than decorates, runs through fifty years of work. The Café Costes in 1984 reinvented the Parisian café and produced a chair that sold 400,000 units. The Louis Ghost chair for Kartell sold over a million. Hospitality interiors for the Mondrian, Royalton, Sanderson, and Le Meurice. Bathroom systems with Hansgrohe AXOR since 1994. Industrial products for Alessi, Vitra, Microsoft, Emeco, and Duravit. The discipline behind these is what Starck calls democratic design: the argument that quality belongs at the lowest possible price the market can support, not the highest, and that a designer’s obligation is to make good things widely available rather than rare things expensive. This is a usable doctrine for executives, not just designers. It treats design as a commercial decision about category position, brand identity, product economics, and customer access. It rejects the binary of luxury versus mass-market and asks instead what quality at scale should look like. It is also a working philosophy, currently being applied to AI-collaborative furniture with Kartell and Autodesk, to hospitality projects from Paris to Zurich to the French Riviera, and to the Axiom commercial space station. Starck is a Knight of the Legion of Honour, an Officer of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of the Harvard Excellence in Design Award, the D&AD President’s Award, and more than 100 international honours. He was the first Frenchman invited to a TED conference and served as artistic director for the French presidency of the European Union. For organisations rethinking how they show up to customers, he offers something rarer than a topic. He offers a method that has built categories. Key speaking topics Democratic design and the economics of quality at scale Design as a driver of brand identity and category creation Hospitality and experience-led environments Product innovation and industrial design Sustainability, dematerialisation, and the future of materials Creativity, AI, and the changing role of the designer The philosophy of useful objects Ideal for Hospitality and consumer brand leadership teams reconsidering how environments and products carry brand identity CMOs, chief brand officers, and customer experience executives who need to argue for design as a commercial lever Product, R&D, and innovation leaders facing decisions about quality, materials, and category position Founders and senior leaders building businesses where design choices and brand identity are inseparable Audience outcomes A working definition of democratic design and how it applies to product strategy, brand position, and pricing decisions A clearer view of when design creates a category versus when it decorates one, with named examples from hospitality and consumer goods Direct exposure to a creator’s view of where design is heading, including AI collaboration, dematerialisation, and the post-plastic era Permission to treat design as a board-level question rather than a downstream finishing exercise

Why organisations work with Purna Virji At Microsoft and LinkedIn she worked the commercialization layer for emerging AI, shaping the strategy and market narratives that decide whether a new capability reaches and convinces a market. She speaks to the gap between what a product can do and what customers adopt from direct operating experience, not observation. She gives executive teams a way to measure AI by business outcomes rather than activity, replacing “time saved” and tokens used with quality lift, scope growth, and capability unlock, the language finance and boards will fund. Her Agent-Led Growth work maps a shift most leaders have not yet priced in: customers delegating discovery and purchase decisions to AI agents, and what that does to how brands get found and trusted. She wrote the award-winning High-Impact Content Marketing (Kogan Page), recognised as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, which grounds her credibility in published, peer-recognised work rather than conference reputation alone. Biography highlights More than a decade across Microsoft and LinkedIn in AI commercialization, go-to-market, and customer engagement, including Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft and Principal Consultant, Content Solutions at LinkedIn. Author of High-Impact Content Marketing (Kogan Page, 2023), a Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title (2024) and Goody Business Book Award winner. Creator of the Agent-Led Growth newsletter, publishing original frameworks on agentic commerce, AI adoption, and trust as a ranking factor. Named the #1 Most Influential PPC Expert in the World (PPC Hero, 2016), an Adweek Young Influential (2018), and Search Personality of the Year (US Search Awards). Honoured Listee, Marquis Who’s Who in America (2023). Has keynoted in more than 20 countries; work featured in Adweek, The Drum, TNW, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. Biography Most AI initiatives do not fail in the lab. They fail in the gap between a working model and a customer who changes nothing about how they work. Purna Virji has spent her career inside that gap, at the point where AI commercialization, go-to-market strategy, and customer behaviour meet. That vantage point is unusual. She spent more than a decade at Microsoft and LinkedIn in commercialization and go-to-market work, latterly focused on emerging AI, where she shaped the strategy and market narratives that decide whether a new capability earns trust and gets adopted. She has seen the failure modes up close, from unclear value to a customer journey that asks too much too soon. Her published work carries the same argument. High-Impact Content Marketing (Kogan Page) was named a Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title, and her Agent-Led Growth newsletter tracks the next shift: customers handing discovery, comparison, and purchase decisions to AI agents acting on their behalf. The implication for brands is direct. Influence moves from catching a person’s eye to earning an agent’s confidence. What she brings to a leadership audience is a way to argue about AI in board language. She reframes success away from time saved and tasks completed toward quality lift, scope growth, and capability unlock, the outcomes that survive a finance review. Her Agent-Led Growth research names the real blocker directly: the Delegation Gap, the distance between what AI can technically do and what people are ready to hand over. For executives funding AI and seeing experimentation rather than impact, closing that gap is the work. Key speaking topics AI commercialization and adoption Agentic commerce and AI-led customer journeys Measuring AI business impact and ROI Go-to-market strategy for AI products Trust, discovery, and brand visibility in the AI era AI-driven sameness and competitive differentiation Ideal for Executive teams and boards funding AI initiatives and asking what return they are getting AI transformation leads, CTOs, and product leaders moving from pilot to deployment CMOs and revenue leaders facing the shift to agent-led discovery and commerce Enterprise B2B and SaaS organisations whose growth depends on AI adoption by customers Audience outcomes A framework for tying AI initiatives to outcomes a board will fund: quality lift, scope growth, capability unlock, rather than activity metrics. A clear picture of how agent-led customer journeys change discovery, trust, and where buying influence sits. A diagnosis of why specific AI initiatives stall at the pilot stage, and where the product-to-market handoff breaks. A way to spot where AI-driven sameness enters content and customer experience, and how to design for differentiation from the start.

Why organisations work with Rafe Offer He has run brand portfolios at the scale most marketers only study, including a $1.2 billion Coca-Cola business and a Disney adult merchandise category that grew from $50m to $800m under his marketing leadership. He turned a single concert in a North London flat into Sofar Sounds, a venture-backed live music network operating in over 300 cities, with $40 million raised and partnerships with Airbnb and Uber. He works on the seam between brand and community, which is where most companies now have to compete and where most marketing leaders lack practical playbooks. His career spans the corporate brand machine and the founder seat, so the same talk holds up in front of a CMO at a listed business and a scale-up CEO with a board to convince. Biography highlights Founder and Founder-Chair of Sofar Sounds, the global live music community founded in London in 2009. Former Director of Global Marketing, Disney Consumer Products, leading worldwide marketing for a $12bn licensing business. Former Global Marketing Director, The Coca-Cola Company, with responsibility for $1.2bn in stores, attractions, events and licensed merchandise. Former Director of Innovation, Diageo. Founder of “this & that,” a community and tech start-up focused on the practice of dialogue. Sofar Sounds named “one of the top new brands in America” by New York Magazine and described as a “quiet revolution” by The Guardian. Biography A live concert in a North London flat in 2009, eight friends invited to listen to a single performer, became the seed of Sofar Sounds. From that evening, Rafe Offer built a global live music network now operating in more than 300 cities, with about $40 million raised across three funding rounds and partnerships with Airbnb and Uber. New York Magazine called it one of the top new brands in America. The unusual part of his career is the route in. Before Sofar, Offer ran the Mickey Unlimited adult merchandise programme at Disney, where the “having fun never goes out of style” campaign helped grow that category from $50m to $800m. He went on to lead worldwide marketing for Disney Consumer Products’ $12bn licensing business, then ran a $1.2bn Coca-Cola portfolio of stores, events and licensed merchandise as Global Marketing Director, before taking a Director of Innovation role at Diageo. That sequence, big-brand operator turned founder, is what gives his perspective its weight. He has built community-led growth from scratch and run brand P&Ls at industrial scale. He talks credibly to a CMO worried about declining ad efficiency and to a founder trying to convert a passionate audience into a fundable business. His more recent venture, this & that, is a community and tech start-up built around the practice of dialogue. It extends the through-line of his work: how organisations earn the right to people’s attention, and how that attention becomes commercial substance. Key speaking topics Brand building in the era of community Customer experience as a growth engine Scaling a start-up from idea to global brand Marketing and innovation inside large organisations Company culture in entrepreneurial businesses Fundraising and commercialising a community brand Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing for a low-trust, low-attention environment Founders and scale-up CEOs converting community traction into investable growth Customer experience and innovation leads inside large consumer businesses Boards reviewing brand and growth strategy in consumer-facing categories Audience outcomes A clearer view of why community has become the central question for consumer brands, with examples from Sofar, Disney and Coca-Cola Specific lessons on running a global brand portfolio at scale, drawn from leading $1.2bn at Coca-Cola and $12bn licensing at Disney A founder’s account of what investors actually fund in a community-led business Practical detail on how culture and customer experience interact in fast-growing companies

Why organisations work with Reed Paget He has built a sustainability brand from a blank sheet, including the UK’s first compostable corn bottle and a working carbon neutral supply chain, so he can speak to climate ambition with operating evidence rather than slide-deck targets. He hard-wired a charitable mission into a commercial business by directing 100% of Belu’s net profits to WaterAid, a model that informs how purpose can be structured into a P&L without becoming marketing decoration. His Schwab Foundation award and UK Cabinet Office ambassadorship give him a policy-level fluency that sits behind the entrepreneur story, useful for boards balancing regulator pressure with commercial reality. Through One Earth Innovation and Ecocap, he has worked across compostable plastics, recyclable packaging, and low-energy products, so he can talk innovation portfolio rather than single-product anecdote. Biography highlights Founder of Belu Water in 2002, positioned as the UK’s most eco-friendly bottled water brand and the world’s first carbon neutral bottled water. Launched the UK’s first compostable plastic bottle made from corn in 2006. UK Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2008, awarded by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Social Enterprise Ambassador for the UK Cabinet Office between 2007 and 2010. Founder of One Earth Innovation, a green product incubator, and founder of Ecocap Ltd., which patented a more recyclable bottle cap design. Award-winning documentary maker whose film Amerikan Passport won Best Documentary at Slamdance 1999. Biography Belu was launched in 2002 as a bottled water company built around an environmental thesis the rest of the category had not yet taken seriously. The business committed 100% of net profits to clean water projects through WaterAid, made the UK’s first compostable corn-based plastic bottle in 2006, and was positioned as the world’s first carbon neutral bottled water brand. That is the kind of operating evidence boards now need behind sustainability claims. The gap between a net zero announcement and the supply chain decisions that deliver it is where most ESG narratives lose credibility, and a founder who has worked through compostable materials, packaging redesign, and a charitable profit structure is talking from inside that problem rather than around it. The wider track record stretches the same instinct across products and policy. One Earth Innovation works as a green product incubator across compostable plastics, sustainable horticulture, and eco-friendly consumer goods. Ecocap, separately, patented a more recyclable bottle cap design. Recognition from the Schwab Foundation as UK Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008, and a three-year Social Enterprise Ambassador role with the UK Cabinet Office, give the commercial story a policy-level frame. Before the eco-entrepreneur chapter, Paget was a journalist and filmmaker, directing Amerikan Passport, a documentary shot across war zones at the end of the Cold War that won Best Documentary at Slamdance 1999. That earlier instinct, going where most cameras did not, runs through the later environmental work. Key speaking topics Sustainable product design and packaging Carbon neutral supply chains Social enterprise business models Green consumer marketing Climate-led innovation portfolios Mission-driven fundraising and investor relations Ideal for Boards and ExCos translating ESG commitments into operating decisions Heads of Sustainability, Packaging, and Supply Chain in consumer goods and FMCG Founders and investors building or backing impact-led ventures Marketing and brand leaders working on credible green positioning Audience outcomes A clearer view of where sustainability ambitions break against product, packaging, and supply chain realities. Specific examples of how a charitable purpose can be structured inside a commercial P&L without becoming marketing varnish. A sharper read on what investors, regulators, and consumers will actually credit as substantive environmental progress. Practical reference points from a founder who has shipped first-of-kind sustainable products at commercial scale.

Why organisations work with Richard Reed He built Innocent from a £500 stall at a London music festival to Europe’s number one smoothie brand and a Coca-Cola exit valued at over half a billion dollars. He ran every stage of that growth as co-CEO of the brand side of the business. JamJar Investments has backed Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health and Tails.com. The portfolio gives him a live investor view of what is working in consumer brands today, beyond any retrospective Innocent story. He pioneered “wackaging”, the on-pack conversational copy that built Innocent’s brand voice. Other UK consumer brands copied the device for more than a decade, which is unusually long-lived evidence of a marketing mechanic that travels. Innocent committed 10% of profits to charity through the Innocent Foundation from day one, and Reed kept that operating model intact through every funding round and the Coca-Cola sale itself. Purpose at scale is something he has actually operated, not theorised. His book “If I Could Tell You Just One Thing” (Canongate, 2016) collected single pieces of advice from Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama and Sir David Attenborough among others. He brings that breadth of access into the room with senior audiences. Biography highlights Co-founder of Innocent Drinks (1998); grown from £500 of fruit at a London music festival to Europe’s number one smoothie brand Sold Innocent to The Coca-Cola Company in 2013, in a transaction valued at over half a billion dollars Co-founder of JamJar Investments, the consumer-focused early-stage venture firm whose portfolio includes Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health and Tails.com Author of “If I Could Tell You Just One Thing…” (Canongate Books, 2016), with interviews including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama and Sir David Attenborough Appointed CBE in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the food industry and to charity Founder of Art Everywhere; co-founder of the Innocent Foundation; presenter of BBC Three’s “Be Your Own Boss” Biography Innocent Drinks started with £500 of fruit at a London music festival in 1998, and a sign asking passers-by whether the founders should give up their day jobs. Fifteen years later, Coca-Cola paid over half a billion dollars for the company. Richard Reed was one of three Cambridge graduates who took it that distance, running the brand side of the business as co-CEO from market stall to category leader. What set Innocent apart at scale was discipline about what to keep. The brand voice, the on-pack “wackaging” copy that competitors imitated for over a decade, and the 10% of profits committed to charity through the Innocent Foundation all stayed intact. They survived every funding round and the eventual Coca-Cola sale. By 2010, Innocent held roughly three-quarters of the UK smoothie market. Since 2013, Reed has invested in the next wave of consumer founders through JamJar Investments. The portfolio reads as a working hypothesis about where consumer brand power is going: Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health, Tails.com. He carries the operator’s view of what scales and what does not into every deal. Beyond the day job, he authored “If I Could Tell You Just One Thing” for Canongate Books in 2016. The book drew single pieces of advice from Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, Sir David Attenborough and forty-odd others, with author’s profits donated to mentoring and social inclusion charities. He was appointed CBE in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the food industry and to charity. Key speaking topics Building consumer brands from start-up to category leader Brand voice, marketing innovation and the wackaging mechanic Social purpose as operating model, not communications layer Scaling under competitive pressure and corporate ownership Early-stage investing in consumer businesses Founder mindset and entrepreneurial discipline at scale Customer conviction and brand love in commodity categories Ideal for Founders and founder-CEOs scaling a consumer-facing business through the awkward middle stages Marketing, brand and customer-experience leaders working on customer conviction inside large organisations Boards and corporate development teams making capital decisions on consumer brands or considering an acquisition of one ESG, sustainability and purpose leads moving social commitments out of communications and into the operating model Audience outcomes A first-hand account of what scaling a consumer brand demands at each stage, from market stall to category leader to corporate exit Specific examples of how Innocent built brand voice, wackaging and category share, and what survived corporate ownership versus what did not A live investor-side read on which consumer-brand bets are paying off, drawn from JamJar’s positions in Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health and Tails.com A grounded argument for why social purpose works commercially when it is built into the operating model, with the Innocent Foundation as the worked example

Why organisations work with Robbie Lyle He built the category. AFTV is the largest football fan channel globally, with 1.7 million YouTube subscribers and over a billion views, created without external investment. Most speakers on community-led media describe the trend; he set the benchmark. He owns the commercial reality of audience-first media. GFN turns over more than £1.4 million a year on a self-financed model, which gives him a working answer to the questions boards actually ask: how do you monetise community without breaking trust, and where does the margin sit. He has taken on incumbent broadcasters and won audience share on their core territory. That is a useful perspective for any organisation watching a digital-native competitor erode a category it used to dominate. His ITV documentary Football Fans Under Their Skin and his work on representation in sport give him a serious second register on race, inclusion and who gets heard in mainstream media, beyond the entrepreneurship story. Biography highlights Founder and Group CEO of Global Fan Network, parent company of AFTV and DR Sports. Founded AFTV in October 2012, now the largest football fan channel worldwide with 1.7 million YouTube subscribers and over a billion total views. Host of Channel 4’s The Real Football Fan Show, which premiered in April 2018. Subject of the 2020 ITV documentary Robbie Lyle: Football Fans Under Their Skin, on race and Black supporters in UK football. Speaker at TEDx Warwick and the Oxford Union. Listed in TechRound’s BAME 50 entrepreneurs. Biography Most of the people who broadcast football matches have never paid for a ticket. Robbie Lyle noticed that gap in 2012, borrowed a camera, and started filming Arsenal supporters outside the Emirates after every game. The channel he launched as Arsenal Fan TV is now AFTV: 1.7 million YouTube subscribers, more than a billion views, and the dominant fan media platform in world football. The business case is more interesting than the YouTube numbers. Lyle has never taken external investment. Global Fan Network, the parent company he founded and runs as Group CEO, now houses AFTV alongside DR Sports and a growing roster of fan-led channels, with turnover above £1.4 million reinvested back into the business. He has done what most legacy media companies are still trying to work out: build a direct relationship with an audience, hold it, and make it pay. That gives him a particular kind of authority on community-led commercial strategy. He can describe, from inside, how a fan channel competes with Sky and BT Sport for the same attention, why authenticity is a working business model rather than a marketing line, and what happens to the economics of a category when the most engaged audience decides it would rather watch other supporters than paid presenters. Channel 4 commissioned The Real Football Fan Show off the back of that argument in 2018. ITV’s Football Fans Under Their Skin, in 2020, used the same platform to examine race in English football and the experiences of Black supporters. He speaks at TEDx Warwick and the Oxford Union, and his TechRound BAME 50 listing reflects the entrepreneurial side of the story. The line his work draws is a useful one for any organisation thinking about audience ownership: communities that already exist are worth more than communities you try to build, and the operators who understand that tend to win the next decade of commercial media. Key speaking topics Fan-led media and audience ownership Community as a commercial model Entrepreneurship without external investment Digital disruption of incumbent broadcasters Representation and race in sports media Authentic content and brand trust Building a category-defining platform Ideal for Media, entertainment and sports businesses rethinking direct-to-audience strategy CMOs and brand leaders working on community, loyalty and creator partnerships Founders and commercial leaders scaling content businesses without venture capital DEI and culture leads programming sessions on representation in media and sport Audience outcomes A working view of how a fan-first platform takes audience share from established broadcasters A concrete commercial framework for community-led businesses that do not rely on external investment An honest read on what authenticity costs and earns inside a content business at scale Sharper questions for any organisation trying to convert audience attention into a defensible commercial position A first-hand account of representation in sport and what changes when underrepresented voices control the platform

Why organisations work with Robert Tercek He has run the digital businesses he now advises on. President of Digital Media at OWN, first SVP of Digital Media at Sony Pictures, Creative Director at MTV. That operating record gives his framing weight that pure analysts cannot match. Vaporized won the 2016 International Book of the Year at the Frankfurt Book Fair from a field of 10,000 titles. The thesis, that whole categories of physical product and intermediary dissolve into software, has held up across a decade of platform and AI shifts. He works in long horizons. General Creativity, his advisory firm, is built around scenario work and ten-year strategic planning, not next-quarter trend commentary, which suits boards making capital-allocation decisions on AI, metaverse and infrastructure. He treats emerging technology as a governance problem, not a hype cycle. His current speaking on the industrial metaverse, digital twins and platform power foregrounds the questions executives and policymakers actually have to answer. Biography highlights Author of Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World, named 2016 International Book of the Year by getAbstract at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Former President of Digital Media, OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. Sony Pictures Entertainment’s first Senior Vice President of Digital Media. Creative Director at MTV, where he helped launch the network across more than 20 international markets. Founder and CEO of General Creativity, advising Fortune 500 clients including AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NBC Universal. Strategic Advisor to the Johnny Carson Foundation and the Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; taught the first interactive media course at USC School of Cinematic Arts. Biography Whole categories of business have already been replaced by software, and most boards still treat that as a channel question. Retail shelves, classroom hours, hotel desks, broadcast schedules, payment rails: each one has been thinned out or absorbed into a platform layer. The pattern Tercek named “dematerialisation” in 2015 is the same pattern now driving the AI and platform conversation in 2026. That naming is documented. Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World won the 2016 International Book of the Year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, selected by getAbstract editors from a field of 10,000 business titles. A decade on, the book reads less like prediction and more like a manual that incumbents wish they had taken seriously when it landed. The credibility comes from operating, not commentary. Tercek was Creative Director at MTV when the network launched into more than 20 international markets, Sony Pictures Entertainment’s first SVP of Digital Media when multiplayer games first ran in a browser, and President of Digital Media at OWN when Oprah Winfrey’s 2009 webcasts pulled the largest live online education audience on record. He now runs General Creativity, advising Fortune 500 clients on digital transformation and long-horizon strategy. His current work focuses on the industrial metaverse, digital twins and the governance questions sitting underneath platform power: who owns the rules, who carries the risk, and what serious organisations should be building rather than buying. He is also a Strategic Advisor to the Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and holds, with collaborators, 12 US patents covering decentralised entertainment and cryptocurrency systems. Key speaking topics Dematerialisation and the virtual economy Industrial metaverse and digital twins Digital transformation strategy Platform power and technology governance AI, automation and the future of work Long-range scenario planning under exponential change Decentralised systems and Web3 Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting ten-year capital allocation against AI, platform and infrastructure shifts Chief Strategy Officers, Chief Digital Officers and transformation leads in incumbent industries facing software-driven disruption Industrial, energy and infrastructure leaders evaluating digital twin and industrial metaverse investments Policy, regulatory and public-sector audiences working on platform governance and technology risk Audience outcomes A working model for spotting which parts of a business are most exposed to dematerialisation, and on what time horizon A clear read on where the industrial metaverse and digital twins create real operating advantage, and where they do not A sharper framework for ten-year scenario planning that survives short-term hype cycles Specific reference points from MTV, Sony, OWN and current Fortune 500 advisory work, not generic futurist commentary

Why organisations work with Rodney Williams He has built two venture-backed fintech companies from concept to scale, including SoLo Funds, the only Black-led Certified B Corp fintech in the US, with over 1 million loans funded for 1.5 million users. He raised more than $40M for LISNR with clients including Visa, Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, and Lenovo, giving him operating experience inside the commercial functions of global brands rather than a venture-capital perspective from the outside. He brings a working operator’s view of financial inclusion that does not collapse into advocacy, anchored in his testimony to federal regulators and direct experience designing products for working and middle-class consumers. Named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list five times across nine years, a recurrence that is unusual and signals durable founder relevance rather than one moment of attention. Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, with the framing capacity that programme selects for, which translates to a keynote that argues rather than just narrates. Biography highlights Co-founder and President, SoLo Funds, the largest community finance platform in the US, with over 1 million loans funded since 2018. Founder and Chair, LISNR, an ultrasonic data-transmission company backed by Visa with over $40M raised. Former Brand Manager, Procter & Gamble, leading digital strategy and ecommerce for Pampers North America. 2019 Henry Crown Fellow, Aspen Global Leadership Network. CNBC Disruptor 50 honouree in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2023. Cannes Gold Lion (2015); Ad Age 40 Under 40 (2012); Black Enterprise Tech Entrepreneur of the Year (2016); Ebony Power 100 (2018). Biography SoLo Funds has facilitated more than a million loans to working and lower-middle-class Americans since 2018, and it did so by treating its users as both borrowers and lenders to each other. The business depends on a functioning peer community, not on a marketing community. That distinction sounds semantic until a leadership team tries to operationalise it. Rodney Williams co-founded SoLo Funds after building LISNR, an ultrasonic data-transmission platform he scaled to over $40M in funding with commercial deployments at Visa, Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, and Lenovo. Before LISNR, he ran digital and ecommerce strategy for Pampers North America at Procter & Gamble, which is where he learned how large consumer organisations actually think about customer acquisition, retention, and brand economics. That sequence matters. He has built community-led commercial models inside a $300B consumer goods business, inside a B2B technology company selling to global brands, and inside a fintech that has become the only Black-led Certified B Corp in its category. The arguments he makes about community as a commercial mechanism are operating arguments, not theoretical ones. He has been named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list five times across nine years, including 2023, and is a 2019 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. His most pointed contribution for a corporate audience is on what financial inclusion actually requires from product, regulatory, and capital partners once advocacy ends and operations begin. SoLo’s growth has placed him in direct conversation with federal regulators, congressional offices, and tier-one investors including Serena Ventures, ACME Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst, and he speaks from inside those conversations rather than from a panel about them. Key speaking topics Community as commercial operating model Founding and scaling venture-backed fintech Financial inclusion and the underserved consumer Brand building inside large consumer organisations Inclusive capital raising and founder ecosystems Disruptive product strategy in regulated markets Black entrepreneurship and category creation Ideal for CMOs, brand leaders, and growth executives at consumer-facing organisations rethinking community as a commercial channel. Boards and leadership teams of banks, fintechs, and financial services firms reassessing the underserved-consumer opportunity. Founders, venture investors, and corporate venture units focused on inclusive innovation and scale-up discipline. DEI, ESG, and impact leaders looking for a founder-operator voice on inclusive commercial outcomes rather than advocacy framing. Audience outcomes A concrete view of how community functions as an operating mechanism inside a commercial business, not as a brand layer. A founder-operator perspective on building, financing, and defending an inclusive product inside a regulated category. Arguments and case material on why the working and lower-middle-class consumer is structurally underserved, and what product responses actually move the market. Direct experience and pattern recognition from raising capital as a Black founder, applicable to inclusive investment and founder-development programmes.

Why organisations work with Roland Mouret He has lived the entire commercial cycle of a creative brand, from the global hit of the Galaxy dress to losing the rights to his own name in 2005, buying them back in 2010, and the brand entering administration in 2021. He talks about that as a practitioner, not a case study. He is one of very few designers who can describe what happens when capital structure and creative authorship come into conflict, and what a founder retains when the legal name is no longer theirs. He is the published author of “Roland Mouret: Provoke, Attract, Seduce” (Rizzoli), a monograph documenting twenty years of work, which gives audiences a clear point of entry into how his thinking on craft and identity holds up across decades. He acted as mentor to Victoria Beckham on the launch of her fashion line, a relationship he discusses publicly and which gives commercial audiences a credible view of how creative authority gets transferred between brands. He is an active voice on sustainability in luxury fashion, including the #SwitchToBlue circular hanger campaign with Arch & Hook and the British Fashion Council, and brings a designer’s view of where the industry’s environmental claims actually break down. Biography highlights British Designer of the Year, Elle Style Awards, 2002. Designer of the Galaxy dress, the defining red-carpet silhouette of the mid-2000s, worn by Cameron Diaz, Scarlett Johansson, Victoria Beckham, the Duchess of Cambridge, and Meghan Markle. Author of “Roland Mouret: Provoke, Attract, Seduce”, published by Rizzoli with Alexander Fury. Founder of the eponymous Roland Mouret label, sold internationally and acquired by Han Chong’s SP Collection (parent of self-portrait) in 2022. Launched the #SwitchToBlue circular hanger initiative with Arch & Hook, supported by the British Fashion Council. Mentor to Victoria Beckham at the launch of her fashion line in 2008, featured in her 2024 Netflix documentary. Biography The Galaxy dress arrived in spring 2006 and became the defining red-carpet silhouette of the decade. Vogue ran the line that for weeks you could not open a magazine without seeing it on a Hollywood A-lister. Less than two months later, its designer had walked away from the company, and lost the legal right to use his own name. That fracture is the centre of Roland Mouret’s story. He is the self-taught French designer, raised above a butcher’s shop in Lourdes, who launched his first London collection in 1998 and won British Designer of the Year at the Elle Style Awards in 2002. He is also the founder who spent five years getting his name back, finally buying the trademark in 2010 with backing from Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. The work since has been a study in what a designer rebuilds when the brand has to be reassembled around the same hands. He published “Roland Mouret: Provoke, Attract, Seduce” with Rizzoli, mentored Victoria Beckham on the launch of her own line in 2008, and pushed the industry on circular packaging through the #SwitchToBlue hanger campaign with Arch & Hook and the British Fashion Council. The brand entered administration in November 2021 and was acquired by Han Chong’s SP Collection the following year. For audiences, the value is the directness of the account. He speaks about creative authorship, capital, and the moments where the two stop agreeing, from inside the experience of a designer whose name has been on the door, off the door, and back on it. Key speaking topics Creative entrepreneurship in luxury fashion Brand authorship and ownership of the founder name Sustainability and circularity in the fashion industry The economics of independent design houses Reinvention after commercial loss Mentorship and creative succession Craft, draping, and the female silhouette Ideal for Founder-led creative businesses, design studios, and luxury brands navigating capital partners or succession CMOs and brand leaders working on authorship, identity, and the commercial weight of a name Sustainability and procurement leads inside fashion, retail, and consumer goods looking at circular packaging and supply After-dinner audiences in creative industries, hospitality, and luxury where storytelling and craft are central Audience outcomes A specific account of how a creative founder loses, then recovers, control of their own brand, with the legal and commercial mechanics named. A working view of where sustainability claims in fashion hold up and where they collapse, drawn from a designer’s daily decisions on fabric, factories, and packaging. A clearer sense of how mentorship between creative founders actually functions, taken from the relationship with Victoria Beckham. A direct read on the economics of an independent luxury house, including the conditions under which one tips into administration.

Why organisations work with Salim Ismail He authored the reference text on exponential organisational design. Exponential Organizations and its 2023 sequel are the most widely cited corporate playbooks for moving from linear operating models to ones built on AI, data, and external leverage. The ExO Sprint, codified in Exponential Transformation, gives boards a 10-week structured method for testing exponential business models inside an existing P&L. It is a managed process, not a keynote concept. He brings the founding-era credibility of Singularity University, where he built the curriculum and faculty alongside Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, then carried that thesis into operating practice through ExO Works and OpenExO. He sits on the XPRIZE Foundation board, giving him direct line of sight on which technology categories are about to compress in cost and capability, and what that means for incumbents in adjacent industries. He speaks to boards and CEOs in the language of organisational structure, not innovation theatre. The takeaway is a diagnostic on where the company will be outpaced and what to redesign first. Biography highlights Lead author, Exponential Organizations (Diversion Books, 2014); Frost & Sullivan Growth, Innovation, and Leadership Book of the Year. Lead author, Exponential Organizations 2.0 (2023), with Peter Diamandis, Michael Malone, and a foreword by Ray Kurzweil. Co-author, Exponential Transformation (Wiley, 2018), the ExO Sprint implementation handbook. Founding Executive Director of Singularity University, with Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. Founder of ExO Works (2016) and Co-founder and Chairman of OpenExO. Board member, XPRIZE Foundation (since March 2017); previously Vice President and Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal incubator. Biography Most large companies are not slow because their leaders are slow. They are slow because their structure was designed for a linear world, where capability, headcount, and asset base scaled in step with revenue. The book that named this problem and offered an alternative model is Exponential Organizations, published in 2014 and updated in 2023. Its lead author is Salim Ismail. The framework came out of the founding years of Singularity University, where Ismail served as Executive Director alongside Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. The question on the table was practical: if computing, sensing, biotech, and energy are all on cost curves that drop by orders of magnitude per decade, what does an organisation built to ride those curves actually look like. The answer became the 10 ExO attributes, including a Massive Transformative Purpose, staff on demand, community and crowd, algorithms, and leveraged assets. It is the reason the book has been picked up as a corporate operating reference rather than a futurist commentary. Through ExO Works and OpenExO, Ismail turned the framework into a transformation method. The ExO Sprint, documented in Exponential Transformation with Francisco Palao and Michelle Lapierre, is a 10-week board-level process for stress-testing existing business models against exponential disruption and building parallel ventures inside the company. He sits on the XPRIZE Foundation board, which keeps the diagnostic anchored to where technology cost curves are actually moving. His operating credentials sit underneath the writing. He led Brickhouse, Yahoo’s internal incubator, evaluating thousands of disruptive ideas and shipping four products. He co-founded PubSub Concepts and Angstro, the latter acquired by Google in 2010. He holds an honours degree in theoretical physics and computing from the University of Waterloo. The biography matters because the framework is not abstract; it is the synthesis of someone who built inside large companies, founded outside of them, and then taught both groups how to think about the next decade. Key speaking topics Exponential organisational design Disruptive convergence of AI, biotech, and energy Business model innovation under exponential cost curves Corporate venturing and the ExO Sprint Future of entrepreneurship and scale-up leverage Strategic foresight for boards Technology-driven workforce redesign Ideal for Boards and CEOs are evaluating whether the current operating model can survive the next decade of technology compression Chief strategy officers and corporate development leads are designing exponential ventures alongside the core business Innovation and digital transformation leaders are moving past pilots into operating-model change Industry forums in financial services, energy, life sciences, and industrials, where incumbents face exponential challengers Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the 10 ExO attributes and a way to score the audience’s own organisation against them A clearer view of which technology cost curves are about to bend in their industry and on what timeline Specific examples of incumbents that have applied the ExO Sprint and what changed in the P&L A diagnostic on where structural drag, not technology, is the actual constraint on exponential growth A point of view on what to centralise, what to distribute, and what to externalise as AI capability deepens