Creativity

Why organisations work with Roberta Lucca She has built a multi-million dollar VC-backed business from scratch and won a BAFTA doing it. Few speakers in the innovation category can show that operational record. As a Venture Partner at Octopus Ventures, she sees what an early-stage company that actually has traction looks like, and translates that pattern recognition into how corporates should evaluate their own internal bets. Her AI material is shaped by founding BOLDR, an AI-powered coaching product, not by commentary at a distance. She speaks about deployment, user behaviour and product reality. She works fluently across gaming, AI and consumer technology, which lets her unpack why game-industry mechanics (engagement loops, iteration speed, distributed teams) increasingly apply to non-games businesses. Visible UK platform credibility through BBC One’s The Apprentice and Amazon Prime’s Ready Set StartUP makes her recognisable to senior internal audiences and easy to position to a wider all-hands. Biography highlights Co-founder of Bossa Studios, the London games studio behind BAFTA-winning Monstermind, Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread BAFTA Games Award winner (Online-Browser category, 2012) Venture Partner at Octopus Ventures, the UK fund whose portfolio includes Zoopla, Cazoo and Depop Co-founder and CEO of BOLDR, an AI-powered virtual coaching product Judge and angel investor on BBC One’s The Apprentice; mentor on Amazon Prime’s Ready Set StartUP Forbes Top 50 Women in Tech; named London’s Most Influential in Creative Arts by the Evening Standard Biography Bossa Studios was a blank canvas in 2010. A decade later it was a VC-backed multi-million dollar games business with a BAFTA on the shelf for Monstermind and global hits in Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread. Roberta Lucca was the co-founder and CMO who shaped that arc, and the experience defines the perspective she brings to corporate audiences. She has since repeated the founder cycle. WonderLuk was an early move into on-demand 3D-printed consumer goods. BOLDR, her current company, is an AI-powered coaching product where she sits as co-founder and CEO. The pattern matters: she has built across gaming, consumer hardware-adjacent commerce and applied AI, which is unusual range for a speaker booked into innovation slots. As a Venture Partner at Octopus Ventures, she sees the deal flow from inside one of the UK’s most active early-stage funds. That vantage point sharpens her view of what genuine traction looks like and how corporates routinely misread it. It also gives her language that lands with executive teams trying to decide whether their innovation programmes are working. She is visible on the UK platforms that senior internal audiences recognise, BBC One’s The Apprentice as a judge and angel investor, and Amazon Prime’s Ready Set StartUP as a mentor. Forbes named her in its Top 50 Women in Tech list, and the Evening Standard named her among London’s Most Influential in Creative Arts. The recognition matters less than the operating record behind it: she is, demonstrably, someone who has built the kind of company most corporate innovation teams say they want to learn from. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and scale-up discipline Applied AI and emerging technology Innovation inside large organisations High-performance team building Creative industries and gamification Diversity in technology and venture Futurism, Web3 and the metaverse Ideal for Boards and ExCos shaping innovation portfolios and corporate venture programmes CMOs, CDOs and product leaders facing decisions on AI and emerging tech investment CHROs and talent leaders rethinking team composition and entrepreneurial capability Conferences and internal summits in technology, media, financial services and consumer goods Audience outcomes A working definition of what early traction looks like inside a new venture, drawn from venture capital deal flow A sharper view of which corporate innovation pilots are worth doubling down on and which are quietly stalling Specific examples of how gaming mechanics and AI products are built, taken from companies she has founded Language to use with boards about risk, capital allocation and team design for innovation bets A more confident point of view on where AI is genuinely changing product, and where it is hype

Why organisations work with Tom Morley A participatory format that gets reserved, senior or fatigued audiences playing, listening and coordinating with each other inside ten minutes, not after a day of icebreakers. Twenty-five years of delivery for Vodafone, Disney, GSK, Hertz, Nokia, Cisco, Adecco and Johnson & Johnson across New York, Moscow, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Paris and London. A working artist’s read of group energy, drawn from a career on stage with Scritti Politti and studio work with David Bowie and Madness, applied to the dynamics inside a leadership offsite. A facilitation method, the 7-Step REMIX Process, that translates the in-room experience into language teams can use back at their desks the following week. Biography highlights Founder member and original drummer of Scritti Politti, the DIY-to-pop band of the 1980s. Studio and live collaborator with David Bowie and Madness. Founder of Instant Teamwork (1999), an arts-based team-building company operating internationally. Corporate clients include Vodafone, Disney, GSK, Hertz, Nokia, Cisco, Adecco and Johnson & Johnson. Author of the 7-Step REMIX Process, a personal development framework adapted from the “More To Life” programme. Charitable work for Teenage Cancer Trust, Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital, MENCAP, Save the Children, UN Women UK and Peace One Day. Biography A power-cut hit the stage during a Scritti Politti show in Berlin. Morley kept the beat going and started a vocal call-and-response with the audience. That moment, in which a room of strangers held a groove together without any technology, became the seed for Instant Teamwork, the arts-based team-building company he founded in 1999. The premise is straightforward. Trust, candour and coordination cannot be lectured into a team. They have to be experienced first, then named. Morley uses live drumming and call-and-response to put a group into a shared rhythm fast, then debriefs what just happened in terms the room can take back to work. The musical credibility is real. He was a founder member of Scritti Politti, recorded with David Bowie and performed live with Madness. The corporate work has had time to develop a method. Vodafone, Disney, GSK, Hertz, Nokia, Cisco, Adecco and Johnson & Johnson have used Instant Teamwork sessions in New York, Moscow, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Paris and London over more than two decades. Around the facilitation sits the 7-Step REMIX Process, adapted from his work with Dr K. Bradford Brown of the “More To Life” programme. It is the language Morley uses to make a participatory session repeatable for teams once the drums are gone. Key speaking topics Team cohesion and group energy Engagement and participation in hybrid teams Creativity and improvisation under pressure Communication and call-and-response as a team behaviour Motivation and collective performance Risk-taking and breaking hierarchical silos Ideal for Annual conferences and leadership offsites that need a high-energy participatory anchor HR and culture leads rebuilding engagement after restructure or remote-working fatigue Sales kick-offs and reward events looking for a shared experience rather than a panel Senior leadership groups doing trust and communication work as part of an away-day Audience outcomes An experience of collective rhythm and coordination that members of the room produced together A felt sense of how quickly a reserved group can become participatory when the format invites it A shared reference point, the session itself, that the team can call back to in meetings afterwards Language from the REMIX framework for talking about creative risk and group communication A reset on the relationship between energy in the room and decisions made later

Why organisations work with Adam Kingl A decade-plus of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led, conducted while at London Business School and Duke Corporate Education, now applied to advising boards on talent and culture strategy. Author of two books from mainstream business publishers (Next Generation Leadership with HarperCollins, Sparking Success with Kogan Page), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category. Primary research inside the creative industries (Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre, the writers’ room of Friends) translated into leadership practice for companies including Pixar, Panasonic, Bosch and Netflix. Very few leadership speakers work from that source base. Adjunct teaching at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. These appointments come through competitive academic review and carry live executive programme responsibility. A decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School and Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education. He has designed and run executive development at scale, which shapes how he reads a boardroom. Biography highlights Author of Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) and Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), the second shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2024 in the Smart Thinking category Former Executive Director of Thought Leadership and Learning Solutions at London Business School (nearly a decade in post) Former Regional Managing Director (Europe) at Duke Corporate Education, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University Adjunct Faculty at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge International Business School and Imperial College Business School Associate of the Møller Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge Contributor and interviewee for the Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The Guardian, Fast Company and The Sunday Times Biography 80% of CEOs name innovation and creativity among their top three priorities. In the same surveyed organisations, 94% of employees rate their company as poor at both. That gap, between what executives say matters and what their organisations actually produce, is the starting point for most of Adam Kingl’s work. Kingl spent nearly a decade as Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School, then led Duke Corporate Education’s European business as Regional Managing Director. He now teaches at UCL School of Management, Hult Ashridge, Imperial College Business School and the Møller Institute at Churchill College, Cambridge. His material is built and tested inside those programmes before it reaches any commercial audience. Next Generation Leadership (HarperCollins, 2020) grew out of a decade of original research into how Generation Y expects to work and be led. It treats generational change as a management design problem. Kingl’s argument is that the old playbook, built on hierarchy and productivity, produces the disengagement and attrition the same playbook is then used to diagnose. Sparking Success (Kogan Page, 2023), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards in the Smart Thinking category, goes inside the arts. Carnegie Hall, Disney Imagineering, Broadway theatre and the writers’ room of Friends are interviewed on how they produce creative output under commercial pressure. Those habits are then mapped into corporate practice at Pixar, Bosch, Panasonic and Netflix. His advisory work spans the BBC, BP, Disney, HSBC, LVMH, Shell and the European Central Bank. Key speaking topics Generational paradigms in leadership Creativity and creative mindset in business Culture and talent strategy Future of work Leadership and management innovation Executive education and capability building Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers reshaping leadership development for a multigenerational workforce CEOs and executive committees where stated innovation and engagement ambitions are outrunning the culture and talent practices meant to deliver them Boards and executive education programmes investing in next-generation leadership capability Learning and development leaders designing curricula for leadership at mid-career and senior level Audience outcomes A sharper diagnostic for why stated priorities on innovation and engagement keep failing to show up in organisational behaviour A set of creative practices borrowed from arts organisations (including how Pixar, Disney Imagineering and the Friends writers’ room actually work) and a route to adopting them in a corporate setting A clearer read on what younger talent actually expects from work, and which of those expectations are non-negotiable for retention A vocabulary for talking about generational differences in the workplace that avoids the usual folklore about “millennials” and “Gen Z”

Why organisations work with Albert Read He ran Conde Nast Britain through the most disruptive decade in publishing, taking titles such as Vogue, GQ and Wired through a shift from print to multi-platform commerce. The lessons translate directly for any business whose product was built for an earlier distribution model. His book The Imagination Muscle (Hachette, 2023) makes a specific argument: imagination is a faculty that can be trained, measured against output, and embedded in how teams work. It gives a leadership audience something more useful than a creativity pep talk. He built and launched Conde Nast operations in China, India and the UAE, which gives him concrete experience of exporting a creative business into new commercial and regulatory environments. As a Senior Advisor to the Milken Institute and External Advisor to Bain and Company, he is engaged by serious institutions for strategic counsel, not as a celebrity author. He is the rare speaker on creativity who has actually carried operating P and L responsibility for creative businesses at scale, which makes the argument credible in a CEO or board setting. Biography highlights Managing Director, Conde Nast Britain, 2017 to 2024. Oversaw British Vogue, GQ, Wired UK, Vanity Fair, Tatler, Conde Nast Traveller, Glamour, House and Garden and World of Interiors. Executive Chairman, The Evening Standard, from September 2024. Author, The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (Hachette, 2023). Senior Advisor, Milken Institute. External Advisor, Bain and Company. Launched Wired UK in 2009 and led Conde Nast market launches in China, India and the UAE. Classics, New College, Oxford. MBA, INSEAD. Contributor to The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times of London. Biography For most of the past two decades, the question facing legacy media businesses has been the same one now reaching every other industry. The product was designed for one distribution model, the audience moved to another, and the response cannot be a slower version of what already exists. Albert Read spent twenty-five years at Conde Nast inside that question, and as Managing Director of Conde Nast Britain from 2017 to 2024 he was the executive accountable for the answer across British Vogue, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, Tatler, Conde Nast Traveller and the rest of the UK portfolio. His operating record covers the parts of reinvention that are easy to claim and hard to do. He launched Wired in the UK, took Conde Nast into new digital products, conferences, awards and education, and led the company’s market launches in China, India and the UAE. In September 2024 he was appointed Executive Chairman of The Evening Standard, taking on the title’s shift from daily to weekly. His book, The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From, published by Hachette in 2023, argues that imagination is not a temperament but a faculty that can be trained, exercised and built into how an organisation works. Spanning examples from cave painting to Steve Jobs, it gives senior leaders something more practical than the usual creativity literature: a way of thinking about creative output as a discipline that responds to environment, observation and routine. Read is a Senior Advisor to the Milken Institute and an External Advisor to Bain and Company. He read Classics at New College, Oxford, holds an MBA from INSEAD, and has written for The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times of London. He is the son of the novelist Piers Paul Read and grandson of the art critic Sir Herbert Read, founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Key speaking topics Creativity and imagination as commercial discipline Leadership through digital disruption in legacy businesses Brand reinvention at scale Human creativity in the age of artificial intelligence Entrepreneurial culture inside large organisations The new responsibilities of the modern leader Ideal for CEOs and executive teams in legacy businesses facing structural reinvention CMOs, brand and content leaders responsible for creative output at scale Innovation, R and D and strategy leaders building creative capability inside large organisations Boards and leadership offsites looking at the human counterweight to AI investment Audience outcomes A working definition of imagination as an organisational capability that can be developed, not a personality trait you either have or do not. Concrete examples from Conde Nast and beyond of how creative businesses survived and grew through digital disruption. A sharper view of where AI extends human creative capacity and where it crowds it out. Specific habits, environments and decisions that make teams more inventive without losing operational discipline.

Why organisations work with Javier Verdura He has shipped category-defining hardware, not slide decks. The Supercharger form, the Powerwall housing and the Solar Roof tile are his team’s work, manufactured globally. He is named inventor on more than 130 patents across surgical equipment, consumer products, packaging and energy hardware. The range is the point: the discipline travels across sectors. He operates inside one of the most demanding product environments in the world, reporting into a company that asks its teams to “fail fast” and still hit volume. Leaders hear how that actually runs day to day. He can speak to the handoff between design, engineering and manufacturing, which is where most product organisations lose time and money. His philosophy is explicit: if you can’t manufacture what you create, it is not worth designing. He brings a credible Latin American voice into rooms that rarely hear one at this level of product leadership, which matters for organisations building global teams. Biography highlights Global Director of Product Design at Tesla since 2012. Product design lead on the Tesla Supercharger network, Powerwall home battery and Solar Roof. Named inventor on more than 130 patents. Graduate of ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena (BS Product Design, 1991). Former VP of Industrial Design and Development at Product Ventures (Connecticut), where he spent roughly 15 years before Tesla. Has taught industrial design at Georgia Tech School of Design and Architecture and at Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM). Biography The Supercharger stall, the Powerwall on the garage wall, the Solar Roof tile that reads as a roof before it reads as a panel. All three had to look inevitable and be manufacturable at volume. Javier Verdura leads the team inside Tesla that does that work, and has since 2012. His route in was unusual. Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, an ArtCenter classmate, called in 2012 and asked him to run product design. By then, Verdura had already spent a full career in industrial design consultancy: senior designer at Group 4 Design in Connecticut, design manager at Inno Design in Atlanta, then fifteen years as VP of design and development at Product Ventures, shipping surgical instruments, consumer goods and packaging for clients including Ingersoll-Rand, Kodak and Panasonic. The through-line is manufacturability. Verdura states his philosophy plainly: if you can’t make what you design, it isn’t worth designing. That discipline is what Tesla bought when it hired him, and it is the lens he brings to audiences wrestling with why their own product pipelines stall between concept and line. He holds more than 130 patents, a BS in Product Design from ArtCenter (1991), and teaching posts at Georgia Tech and Universidad de Monterrey. He is one of the most senior Mexican-born product leaders in the global technology sector, a fact that gives his accounts of working inside Tesla an additional resonance for organisations thinking about where their next generation of design and engineering talent comes from. Key speaking topics Product design leadership at scale Design-to-manufacture discipline Innovation inside Tesla: Supercharger, Powerwall, Solar Roof Electric vehicles and the energy transition Patent-driven product development Building global design and engineering teams Latin American talent in global technology Ideal for CEOs, CPOs and heads of R&D running product organisations where design, engineering and manufacturing have to meet on the same timeline. Boards and leadership teams in automotive, energy, consumer hardware and industrials benchmarking their innovation pipeline against Tesla’s. Design and engineering leadership summits that want an operator, not a theorist. Corporate events building Latino and Hispanic executive networks at a senior technical level. Audience outcomes A clear, first-hand account of how Tesla turns a pencil sketch into manufactured hardware at a global scale. The operating logic behind “fail fast” when the failures cost real capital, not slideware. A practical view of where most product organisations break between design, engineering and manufacturing, and where Tesla’s handoff is structured differently. Specific examples from the Supercharger, Powerwall and Solar Roof programmes, not generic innovation theory. A sharper sense of what a modern product leadership function has to look like to ship category-defining hardware.

Why organisations work with Fernando Trias de Bes He is the only Spanish author to have co-written books with Philip Kotler, and the frameworks in Lateral Marketing and Winning at Innovation give leadership teams a shared vocabulary for where their ideas actually come from. Winning at Innovation, with its A-to-F Model, won the CMI Innovation and Entrepreneurship category at the 2013 Management Book of the Year Awards, a credential that speaks directly to boards asking how innovation should be structured inside the firm. He runs Salvetti and Llombart, a Barcelona-based consumer research and innovation consultancy whose client list has included PepsiCo, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle and McKinsey, which means the classroom work is tested against paying clients. He bridges two registers most economists do not reach, serious academic marketing theory and popular business writing, and audiences that have read La buena suerte or El libro negro del emprendedor often arrive already familiar with his thinking. He presents in English and Spanish and has been delivering executive-level keynotes since 2003, with hundreds of international engagements behind him. Biography highlights Associate Professor of Marketing Management at ESADE Business School since 1994. Co-author with Philip Kotler of Lateral Marketing (Wiley, 2003) and Winning at Innovation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). CMI Management Book of the Year 2013, Innovation and Entrepreneurship category, for Winning at Innovation. Founder and President of Salvetti and Llombart, a consumer insight and innovation consultancy working with PepsiCo, Sony, HP, Nestle and McKinsey. Regular columnist for La Vanguardia, ARA and El Pais Semanal; author of more than twenty books of essay and fiction translated into more than thirty languages. Winner of the Premio Espasa de Ensayo (2015), Premio De Hoy de Ensayo (2009) and Shinpukai Prize (Japan, 2005). Biography Most innovation in large companies is lateral in name only. Teams segment further, tweak an existing product, and call it new. Fernando Trias de Bes spent two decades arguing, in books co-written with Philip Kotler, that this is the core reason corporate pipelines stall, and building methods that address it directly. Lateral Marketing, published by Wiley in 2003, set out a structured way to generate product concepts that do not come from narrower segmentation but from a different logical operation on the category itself. Winning at Innovation, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011, took the argument further with the A-to-F Model, a step-by-step description of the roles and stages an organisation needs to convert ideas into launches. The Chartered Management Institute named it Innovation and Entrepreneurship Book of the Year at its 2013 awards. Trias de Bes has taught marketing and innovation at ESADE Business School since 1994 and runs Salvetti and Llombart, the Barcelona consumer research and innovation consultancy he co-founded in 1996. Clients have included PepsiCo, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, McKinsey and Nestle, which gives the academic frameworks a field of consumer goods and services to answer to. Beyond the business books he writes columns for La Vanguardia, ARA and El Pais Semanal, and has published essays and novels translated into more than thirty languages, including La buena suerte, co-written with Alex Rovira, and El libro negro del emprendedor. The Premio Espasa de Ensayo in 2015 sits alongside earlier recognition in Japan and Spain. That range, economist, consultant, columnist, novelist, is the unusual shape of the author, and it is what audiences tend to remember from the keynote. Key speaking topics Business model innovation Lateral marketing and creativity in commercial strategy The A-to-F Model for organising innovation Entrepreneurship and the economics of new ventures Economic trends and consumer behaviour Corporate reinvention and disruptive thinking Ideal for CMOs, CSOs and heads of innovation confronting commoditised categories and stalled pipelines. Executive committees running corporate strategy offsites on growth and reinvention. Business schools and management development programmes covering innovation, marketing and entrepreneurship. Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for lateral versus vertical innovation that a leadership team can use the next day. The A-to-F structure for assigning innovation roles and stages inside an organisation. Concrete examples, drawn from consumer goods and services, of where breakthrough ideas actually come from. A sharper read on why most corporate innovation produces line extensions rather than category moves.

Why organisations work with Dave Noll He brings a working television creator’s instinct for what survives a pitch room, drawn from selling 60-plus series and more than 3,500 episodes to global networks. The Chopped origin story is a usable case study in persistence. The format was rejected by Food Network before becoming one of the longest-running cooking competitions on US television and earning a James Beard Award. His credentials sit outside the usual corporate speaker pool, which makes the message about creative risk land differently with sales and innovation audiences who have heard the standard versions. He frames innovation as a commercial discipline rather than an ideation exercise, focused on what gets bought, what gets renewed, and what scales internationally. Biography highlights Co-creator of Chopped (Food Network, 2009 to present); franchise inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame. Two-time Emmy Award winner and two-time Gracie Award winner. Chopped won the James Beard Award for Best Television Series in 2012. Co-founder of Keller Noll, a New York-based format development company with international productions across Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, South Africa, Turkey and the United States. Creator of America Says (Game Show Network), No Kitchen Required (BBC America), Rocco’s Dinner Party (Bravo), Beat the House (HGTV), Face The Truth (CBS) and Punchline (FOX). Signed a first-look deal with Boat Rocker in 2021, reported in Deadline. Biography Chopped was rejected by Food Network the first time it was pitched in 2007. The same concept, brought back months later, became one of the longest-running cooking competition formats on US television, has aired since 2009, was inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame and won the 2012 James Beard Award for Best Television Series. The producer behind it is Dave Noll, co-founder of Keller Noll, a New York-based format development company he runs with Cleve Keller. Together, they have created and sold more than 60 television series and produced over 3,500 episodes, with productions filmed across eight countries and a 2021 first-look deal with Boat Rocker. His value to a commercial audience is the working knowledge of what it takes to get an idea past the people who say no for a living. That includes America Says on Game Show Network, No Kitchen Required on BBC America, Rocco’s Dinner Party on Bravo, Face The Truth on CBS, and the wider game-show and competition portfolio that the partnership has built since 2007. For sales, marketing and innovation teams, his contribution is closer to a master class in commercial creativity than a leadership talk. He works in an industry where every pitch is graded on what audiences will actually choose to watch, and brings that discipline into rooms where corporate innovation often loses contact with the customer. Key speaking topics Innovation as a commercial discipline Creative persistence and pitch resilience Turning rejected ideas into market-ready products Storytelling and format thinking for brand teams Sales performance and customer-centred creativity Team-level creative culture in deadline-driven environments Ideal for Sales and revenue leadership audiences working on creative differentiation Marketing, brand and innovation teams inside consumer-facing organisations Corporate offsites and annual kick-offs that want a non-corporate voice on creativity and commercial risk Higher education and association audiences focused on entrepreneurship and media Audience outcomes A concrete example of how a category-defining product survives repeated rejection before reaching the market A working producer’s perspective on what makes a creative idea commercially durable Practical reference points from inside one of television’s most successful format development partnerships Renewed conviction in pushing creative work through internal gatekeepers without diluting it

Why organisations work with Scott Dikkers A published method for generating creative output at volume, codified in the “How to Write Funny” series and tested over three decades of running The Onion newsroom. The founder’s view of how a $16,000 college newspaper became a national satirical brand worth multiples of that, with a defined argument about mission, culture and creative discipline drawn from “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Built and runs the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City in Chicago, training comedy writers who have gone on to Emmy-winning television rooms, so the keynote sits on top of a working teaching practice. A practitioner’s perspective on creativity in the age of generative AI, framed around how human writers and editors keep brand voice intact when first drafts are cheap and originality is not. Biography highlights Founder of The Onion and TheOnion.com, the world’s first humour website. Longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures (1988-1999 and 2005-2008) and former General Manager and VP of Creative Development. Number one New York Times bestselling author of “Our Dumb Century,” winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Author of more than 30 books, including the “How to Write Funny” series, “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Creator of the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City training centre in Chicago. Syndicated cartoonist of “Jim’s Journal,” distributed to college newspapers across the United States from 1987 to 1997. Biography A satirical college newspaper bought for $16,000 in 1989 became one of the most recognisable brands in American media. The route from there to a national audience, a Peabody-winning news network and a publishing list that has sold millions of copies was not luck. It was a writers’ room run with unusual discipline, and Scott Dikkers ran it for most of its formative years. As editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures, and later as General Manager and VP of Creative Development, Dikkers built the editorial process that produced the headlines most readers can still quote. He launched TheOnion.com in 1996, the first humour website on the internet, and went on to edit “Our Dumb Century,” a number one New York Times bestseller that won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and has sold more than half a million copies. The argument behind his commercial work is set out in “How to Write Funny,” “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Comedy is not magic. It is a method, and brand voice is the operational output of that method. Dikkers codified the process at The Onion, then transferred it into the “Writing with The Onion” programme he created at The Second City training centre in Chicago, where his students have been hired into Emmy-winning television rooms. For corporate audiences, the relevance is direct. Generative AI has made first drafts trivial and originality scarce. Dikkers’ keynote takes the writers’ room discipline that built The Onion and applies it to creative output, brand voice and the question every marketing and product team is now asking: how do you keep what makes your work yours when the cost of imitation has collapsed. Key speaking topics Creativity as an operating discipline Brand voice and editorial culture Humour and storytelling in business communication Building a media brand from a standing start Creative leadership in the age of generative AI Media literacy and the reading of satire Mission-led culture in creative organisations Ideal for CMOs, brand and content leaders managing creative output at scale Innovation, R&D and product leadership teams working alongside generative AI tools Communications, internal comms and L&D leaders rebuilding storytelling capability Entrepreneurship programmes and founder audiences at universities and conferences Audience outcomes A working method for generating original creative material, drawn from the writers’ room that built The Onion A clearer language for what brand voice is and how it survives contact with AI-generated content A founder’s view of how a small editorial team scaled into a national media business without losing its identity A sharper test for distinguishing satire and credible information in a feed-driven media environment A reference set of named examples from three decades of Onion headlines that a team can take back into its own creative reviews

Why organisations work with Phil Hansen A creativity argument grounded in a documented personal case. The shift from precision pointillism to working with tremor became the basis for a body of work, not a recovery story bolted onto a talk. A live participatory format. Audiences co-create a physical artwork during the session and keep it, which gives the message a durable internal artefact most keynotes cannot leave behind. A TED2013 main-stage talk that has sustained a public audience for more than a decade, used in classrooms and corporate learning programmes alongside the keynote. A track record across creative and commercial platforms including Adobe MAX, the Grammy Awards, Disney, the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. A Guinness World Record portrait built from 52,901 individual dots, which functions as a tangible proof point for the discipline of working within self-imposed constraint. Biography highlights TED2013 speaker, “Embrace the Shake.” Author of “Tattoo a Banana” (Perigee/Penguin Random House, 2012) and “Phil Hansen: In Process” (2015). Guinness World Record holder for the largest connect-the-dots image (52,901 dots, 2017). Keynote and live-art appearances for Adobe MAX, the Grammy Awards, Disney, Skype, Mazda, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Million Dollar Round Table and the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. Featured by Discovery Channel, Good Morning America, BBC and PBS. Biography A neurologist’s instruction to “embrace the shake” became the starting point for an entire body of work. The pointillism Hansen had trained on was no longer physically available to him. What replaced it was a practice built around unusual materials, unusual surfaces and the deliberate use of constraint as the brief itself, captured in the time-lapse videos that have become his signature output. The TED2013 talk made that case to a general audience. The keynote translates it for organisations: when teams treat constraint as the problem, they spend their energy on the constraint. When they treat it as the brief, they spend it on the work. The argument is simple, the proof is the practice it produced. The corporate engagements followed the talk: Adobe MAX, the Grammy Awards, Disney, Skype, Mazda, the Rockefeller Foundation. The format is unusual for a business audience because the audience makes something. A collaborative artwork is produced live in the room and stays with the client, which gives the session a physical residue most keynotes do not. The Guinness record for a connect-the-dots image of 52,901 points sits alongside the books, “Tattoo a Banana” and “In Process,” as evidence that the method is not a story about overcoming an obstacle. It is a working discipline that has produced output for two decades. Key speaking topics Creativity under constraint Innovation culture in resource-limited environments Reframing limitation as creative brief Collaborative creative practice Resilience and creative reinvention Experiential keynote and live-art performance Ideal for Innovation, R&D and product leaders building team creative practice under tighter budgets CHROs and culture leads running offsites, leadership conferences and post-restructure team events Marketing, design and brand teams looking for an experiential session rather than a lecture format Conference programmers seeking a high-energy participatory keynote to anchor a programme Audience outcomes A working definition of constraint as a creative input, with a specific example produced live in the room A physical collaborative artwork created during the session that the organisation keeps Language to use internally when teams default to treating constraint as the problem A reference case (the shake, the materials, the record) that travels easily inside the organisation after the event

Why organisations work with Ben Hanlin He has spent twenty years professionally holding the attention of audiences who did not ask to be entertained, a craft most keynote speakers approximate and never master. His engagement and rapport techniques are not theoretical. They are the working methods of a magician adapted for sales teams, client conversations and conference stages, and they were sharp enough to win Best TEDx Speaker at The Speaker Awards 2024. He is one of the few speakers who can credibly anchor a full conference day, opening with a keynote, hosting the agenda, and closing with the awards, without changing register. Major brand audiences including Google, PwC, Coca-Cola and Amplifi book him for the same reason: he reliably resets the energy of a room and gives an audience something to remember about it the next morning. The Speaker Awards 2024 triple, Speaker of the Year, Best Newcomer and Best TEDx Speaker, was judged by industry bookers on content, delivery and bookability. That combination of recognitions in a single year is rare. Biography highlights Creator, writer and star of ITV2’s hidden-camera magic series Tricked, three series broadcast 2013 to 2016. Presenter of Breaking Magic on the Discovery Channel. Series 12 finalist on ITV’s Dancing on Ice (2020), finishing fourth. Speaker of the Year, Best Newcomer and Best TEDx Speaker at The Speaker Awards 2024. TEDx London speaker, “How to Create INSTANT Engagement and Connection” (2024). Combined online following of two million plus across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Biography Most keynote speakers learn to hold a room by stepping onto a corporate stage. Ben Hanlin learned it on the street, in pubs and on prime-time television, where the audience has not agreed in advance to pay attention and the speaker has roughly four seconds to earn it. Twenty years of working as a professional magician is, among other things, twenty years of solving that problem. That craft moved onto television with Tricked, the ITV2 hidden-camera magic series he created, wrote and presented across three series between 2013 and 2016, followed by Breaking Magic on the Discovery Channel and a fourth-place finish on series 12 of Dancing on Ice. The work travels: his combined audience across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook now sits above two million. The keynote work is a translation of the same discipline. Hanlin teaches the working methods a magician uses to create rapport, hold attention and make a message stick, applied to sales conversations, client meetings, leadership presence and the inside of a conference room. In 2024 his TEDx London talk “How to Create INSTANT Engagement and Connection” was named Best TEDx Speaker at The Speaker Awards. At the same ceremony he was also named Speaker of the Year and Best Newcomer, judged by industry bookers on content, delivery and bookability. Organisations including Google, PwC, Coca-Cola and Amplifi book him in three modes: keynote on engagement and human connection, full-day conference facilitation, and high-energy awards hosting. The common thread is the same craft applied at different scales, the ability to walk into a room of distracted people and leave it as a connected audience. Key speaking topics Engagement and human connection Instant rapport and audience attention Communication under pressure Innovation and creative confidence Resilience and dealing with failure Conference hosting and awards facilitation Ideal for Sales conferences, kick-offs and national sales meetings Awards nights and gala dinners requiring a host who can also deliver content Leadership and client-facing teams working on rapport, presence and communication Full-day conferences needing a single anchor across keynote, facilitation and after-dinner roles Audience outcomes A working set of rapport and attention techniques drawn from twenty years of professional magic, usable the next morning in client meetings. Sharper instincts for reading a room and recovering it when energy drops. A clearer sense of how to make a message land and be remembered. A shared, high-energy moment that resets the tone of the conference or sales event.

Why organisations work with Speech Thomas His B.R.A.V.E. framework (Bold, Resilient, Adaptable, Vulnerable, Encouraging) is proprietary, named IP built from firsthand experience navigating commercial failure, personal loss, and creative reinvention across a multi-decade career, not a theoretical model adapted from management literature He integrates live musical performance structurally into the keynote itself, creating a shared emotional experience that makes the framework’s principles felt rather than simply heard – a format no other leadership speaker with equivalent platform credibility replicates The vulnerability pillar of B.R.A.V.E. carries specific weight: his origin story involves growing up in statistically one of the most difficult environments for Black youth in America and losing both his grandmother and brother in the same week; circumstances that directly shaped the framework’s architecture His 16 Bars documentary – in which he led a songwriting and recording collaboration inside a Virginia jail – provides independently verified, third-party evidence that his approach to creativity and leadership character works in conditions far more demanding than any corporate conference room The Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship, a 501(c)3 he established in 1992, has directed over $1M in educational stipends to students from underserved communities – demonstrating that the «encouraging» principle of B.R.A.V.E. is operational, not rhetorical Biography highlights Founder, lead vocalist and producer of Arrested Development; two-time Grammy winner: Best New Artist and Best Rap Performance (1993) Arrested Development’s debut album 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of… achieved multi-platinum certification in the United States «Tennessee» named one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s «500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll» Solo single «Like Marvin Gaye Said» held #1 on Japan’s Tokio 100 chart for seven consecutive weeks; solo album Spiritual People certified Gold by the RIAJ Producer and collaborator on 16 Bars (2018), an award-winning documentary following a music rehabilitation programme inside Richmond City Jail — winner of Best Documentary at the Downtown L.A. Film Festival Creator of the B.R.A.V.E. leadership framework, now delivered as a keynote at corporate, association and government conferences globally Founder of the Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship (501(c)3, est. 1992), which has provided over $1M in stipends to university students from at-risk communities across three decades Biography The qualities most organisations say they want from their leaders – courage under pressure, the ability to adapt without losing direction, the willingness to be honest when honesty is costly – are precisely the ones that conventional leadership development struggles to instil. Why? Because they cannot be taught from a slide deck. They are formed through experience, reinforced through narrative, and transmitted most effectively when the person articulating them has actually lived them. Speech Thomas built his B.R.A.V.E. framework (Bold, Resilient, Adaptable, Vulnerable, Encouraging) from a career that required each of those qualities under genuine pressure. As the founder and lead vocalist of Arrested Development, he led a group that achieved two Grammy Awards and multi-platinum sales for a debut album that ran directly against the dominant commercial trends of its era. When the group disbanded, he rebuilt independently, building a substantial solo career across five albums and finding his largest audience in Japan – territory he entered without the infrastructure that had supported the group’s earlier success. What distinguishes his keynote from the standard musical-career-as-leadership-metaphor format is that the framework is specific and teachable, and the performance is structural rather than decorative. Speech integrates live music into the keynote itself because the argument he is making – that vulnerability and creative courage are leadership competencies, not personality traits – is demonstrated more effectively through song than through slides. His 16 Bars documentary, in which he led a songwriting and recording programme inside Richmond City Jail, provides third-party evidence that this methodology produces results in conditions that test it genuinely. The Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship, which he established in 1992 following his brother’s death and which has since distributed over $1M to students from underserved communities, is where the «encouraging» pillar of B.R.A.V.E. becomes most legible. For boards and senior leadership teams evaluating whether a speaker’s values are substantive or performative, it is a credible and verifiable answer. Key speaking topics B.R.A.V.E. leadership framework Leadership character development Creativity and the artistic process as organisational tools Storytelling and voice in leadership communication Resilience and adaptability under pressure Music, culture and social impact Criminal justice reform and rehabilitation through creative practice Ideal for Senior leadership and executive teams exploring the relationship between character, culture and organisational performance CHROs and talent development leaders building leadership pipeline programmes that go beyond technical capability Conferences in creative industries, media, entertainment and arts sectors DEI and culture transformation events requiring a speaker whose credibility is built from lived experience rather than consultancy Audience outcomes A named, five-part leadership framework (B.R.A.V.E.) that individuals can apply to their own professional context A reframe of vulnerability from personal risk to leadership asset – with a credible, tested example of why it matters Practical perspective on how storytelling and creative expression function as tools for communication, not just culture A more concrete understanding of what distinguishes leadership under pressure from leadership in comfortable conditions Where a live performance element is included: a shared emotional experience that anchors the session’s themes in a way that participants recall and reference beyond the event itself

Why organisations work with Kelly Vero She has shipped AAA games (including credits across the Lara Croft and Transformers franchises) and now runs an AI-powered digital fashion business, so she speaks about immersive technology from the inside of two different commercial stacks, not from a consultancy slide. As CEO and CTO of NAK3D, she gives leadership teams a concrete view of how 3D content, AI and consumer brands are starting to fit together at production scale. Her book How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals (Routledge) gives executives a structured way to read the metaverse as the natural extension of forty years of game technology, not a marketing fad. She has worked at policy and institutional level with the European Commission and Pro Helvetia, which means she can frame technology questions in terms a regulated board will recognise. Biography highlights CEO and CTO of NAK3D, a Swiss AI-powered digital fashion start-up. Chief Metaverse Officer at Aequaland, an educational platform for children. Author of How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals, published by Routledge. Earlier edition nominated for the British Business Book Awards 2024. 30-year career in interactive entertainment, with credits across the Lara Croft and Transformers franchises. Consultant to the European Commission, Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council) and Confetti Media Group. Won a Startup Innovation Award at a World Economic Forum-linked event in Davos, January 2024. Biography The metaverse arrived in the boardroom as a slogan and left as a question: where is the operational substance behind any of this. The honest answer is that it sits inside the games industry, where 3D worlds, real-time content pipelines and live-service economies have been working at scale for two decades. That is the world Kelly Vero has spent thirty years inside. Her credits stretch across the Lara Croft franchise and Hasbro’s Transformers games, taking her from script and character work into production at the heart of mass-market AAA development. The result is a deep, practitioner-level grasp of how immersive technology actually gets built, shipped and monetised. She now applies that experience as CEO and CTO of NAK3D, a Swiss AI-powered digital fashion company sitting between gaming, virtual platforms and consumer brands. NAK3D won a Startup Innovation Award at a World Economic Forum-linked event in Davos in January 2024. Vero is also Chief Metaverse Officer of the children’s education platform Aequaland, and has consulted for the European Commission and Pro Helvetia on technology and creative policy. Her book How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals, published by Routledge, treats the metaverse as the next chapter of a long technical lineage, not a sudden hype cycle. For boards trying to decide what to fund, what to ignore and what to build, that frame is more useful than any forecast. Key speaking topics AI and 3D commerce The metaverse as commercial infrastructure Digital fashion and virtual goods Generative AI in creative production Game design as a model for customer experience Web3 and immersive platforms Innovation strategy in deep tech Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders deciding how to commit to virtual goods, digital fashion and immersive customer experience CEOs and boards of consumer and entertainment businesses weighing AI and 3D investment CTOs and digital transformation leads scoping AI commerce, content pipelines and creative AI Investors and innovation teams in retail, fashion, media, gaming and adjacent sectors Audience outcomes A clear read on which immersive and metaverse claims are commercially serious and which are not Concrete examples of how AI and 3D content are already reshaping fashion, retail and entertainment commerce A working frame for treating game technology as the parent discipline of the metaverse, with practical implications for product and platform decisions Confidence to scope a first credible AI or 3D content initiative, rather than commission another exploratory study