Entrepreneurship

Why organisations work with Tim Smit He does not make the case for sustainability in principle. Instead, he has built one of Britain’s most visited destinations on the premise that ecological purpose and economic return are the same project. The Eden Project’s contribution to the Cornish economy exceeds £1.9 billion. His KBE was awarded specifically for services to public engagement with science, recognition that his primary skill is making complex environmental challenges legible and motivating to non-specialist audiences, including sceptical ones. Where most ESG speakers work from frameworks or research, Smit works from operations: active international development projects in Colombia, Australia, China, and Northern Ireland, each built on the Eden model of derelict land, public-private partnership, and ecological purpose that also generates revenue. He reframes the internal sustainability conversation from risk mitigation and reporting into a question of commercial imagination, which is a materially different starting point for a leadership team than most ESG speakers offer. The Lost Gardens of Heligan, his account of the first restoration project, was voted Sunday Times Book of the Year in 1997, evidence of an unusual ability to make environmental ambition into a story that reaches well beyond specialist audiences. Biography highlights Co-founder and Executive Vice-Chair, Eden Project, Cornwall: former china clay pit transformed into one of Britain’s most visited destinations, contributing over £1.9 billion to the regional economy Director, Lost Gardens of Heligan: co-led restoration of the neglected Tremayne estate; his account of the project was voted Sunday Times Book of the Year, 1997 KBE (Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire), awarded 2011, substantive 2012, for services to public engagement with science RSA Albert Medal, 2003; Morgan Stanley Great Britons Award (Environment category), 2007; Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year special award, 2011 Speaker at TEDxKingsCross, 2021 – «How We’re Going to Solve Climate Change» (COP26 countdown event) Author of two books: The Lost Gardens of Heligan and Eden (Penguin, updated 15th anniversary edition, 2016) Biography The Eden Project began as a derelict china clay pit in Cornwall. It now attracts over a million visitors a year and has contributed more than £1.9 billion to the regional economy. Sir Tim Smit KBE conceived it in 1995, opened it in 2001, and has spent the intervening years using it as a working proof: that environmental ambition and commercial success are the same project, not a trade-off between them. Smit’s central argument is about courage as much as strategy. Most organisations approach sustainability as a compliance function; obligations to manage, metrics to report. Eden was built to demonstrate something more radical: that a project rooted in ecology, science communication, and community investment could produce a destination business with private financing, a £1.9 billion economic footprint, and a KBE from the Crown for services to public engagement with science. The model is now being replicated globally. Through Eden Project International, formally launched in 2017, Smit has secured partnerships with national governments in Colombia – working with the Humboldt Institute on a biome in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, alongside active development projects in Australia, China, and Northern Ireland. The ambition is an Eden presence on every inhabited continent. For executives navigating the gap between ESG commitment and meaningful action, Smit’s contribution is specific and uncomfortable in equal measure. He has spent three decades demonstrating that the starting point for a new business model can be a landscape others have written off. The barrier, in his view, is not knowledge or resource; it is a failure of commercial imagination, and he has built institutions to fill it. Key speaking topics Environmental regeneration as a commercial business model ESG strategy and the economics of sustainability Entrepreneurship and large-scale transformational project delivery Science communication and public engagement with environmental issues Multi-stakeholder project leadership across public, private, and community sectors Climate action and biodiversity: the business opportunity framing Place-based and regional economic regeneration Ideal for CEOs and executive teams building or pressure-testing sustainability and ESG strategy Boards facing investor, regulatory, or employee pressure on environmental commitments Transformation and programme directors overseeing large-scale environmental, infrastructure, or regeneration initiatives Public sector and civic leaders working on regional development and post-industrial recovery Audience outcomes A reframe of sustainability from reporting obligation to genuine business model, with specific, quantified evidence from Eden’s own track record Practical understanding of how to structure and sustain multi-stakeholder projects at transformational scale A more ambitious and commercially grounded vocabulary for internal ESG conversations Exposure to a model of science communication that moves non-specialist audiences to change behaviour, not just awareness Confidence that large-scale environmental projects can attract private capital and deliver measurable economic returns alongside ecological impact

Why organisations work with Peter Vogel He holds the Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy at IMD, one of the only dedicated academic chairs in Europe focused on how wealthy families turn giving into strategy rather than reputation management. His two reference books, Family Philanthropy Navigator and Family Office Navigator, function as operating manuals for principals and advisors, and the philanthropy title won the Axiom Business Book Awards silver medal. He directs the IMD Global Family Business Center, which gives him a live view across hundreds of enterprising families and their governance, succession, and investment decisions. He is also an operator: founder and non-executive Chairman of Delta Venture Partners, which means founder and family-office audiences hear practitioner judgement, not only academic frameworks. Family Capital ranked him among the Top 100 Family Influencers globally, and Poets&Quants named him to its Best 40 Under 40 business school professors list. Biography highlights Professor of Family Business and Entrepreneurship, IMD Business School, Lausanne. Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy and Director, IMD Global Family Business Center. Co-author of Family Philanthropy Navigator (Axiom Business Book Awards Silver Medal) and Family Office Navigator. Author of Generation Jobless? (Palgrave Macmillan) on the youth employment crisis. Founder and non-executive Chairman, Delta Venture Partners AG; Associate Partner, Cambridge Family Enterprise Group. Inducted into the Family Business Hall of Fame (2024); Poets&Quants Best 40 Under 40 business school professors (2022). Biography Most family businesses do not survive the second generation, and most family offices are built reactively, after a liquidity event, with little design behind them. The work that decides whether enterprising families compound capital or destroy it happens in governance, succession, and philanthropy, areas treated as private until they go wrong in public. Peter Vogel’s research and teaching at IMD sit precisely there. At IMD Business School in Lausanne, he holds the Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy and directs the Global Family Business Center, which works with principals, next-generation owners, and their advisors across continents. The chair, funded by the Debiopharm Group, is one of very few dedicated academic posts in Europe focused on how families convert wealth into strategic giving rather than reputational signalling. His two reference books, Family Philanthropy Navigator and Family Office Navigator, are used by family principals and their advisors as practical operating guides. The philanthropy title won the Axiom Business Book Awards silver medal. Before the family-enterprise work, he wrote Generation Jobless? (Palgrave Macmillan), a global analysis of youth unemployment built on interviews with policymakers, employers, and young entrepreneurs. He is also a practitioner. He founded and chairs Delta Venture Partners, an early-stage investment firm, and is an Associate Partner of the Cambridge Family Enterprise Group. Family Capital has named him to its Top 100 Family Influencers list; Poets&Quants placed him among its Best 40 Under 40 business school professors; and in 2024 he was inducted into the Family Business Hall of Fame. Key speaking topics Family business governance and succession Family office design and operating models Strategic philanthropy for enterprising families Next-generation ownership and leadership Entrepreneurship inside family enterprises Multi-generational wealth and capital allocation Ideal for Principals and next-generation members of family-owned businesses and family offices Advisors to enterprising families: private banks, wealth managers, multi-family offices, legal and tax counsel Boards of family-controlled companies considering succession, governance reform, or philanthropic strategy Foundation trustees and philanthropy leaders inside enterprising families Audience outcomes A clearer view of what separates family enterprises that survive transitions from those that fragment A vocabulary for the three connected systems in an enterprising family: the operating business, the family office, and the philanthropy Practical reference points for governance design, ownership succession, and next-generation engagement A sharper sense of where philanthropy belongs in family strategy and where it does not

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

Why organisations work with Sahar Hashemi She has built three commercial ventures from a standing start. Coffee Republic (110 stores, £50 million market cap), Skinny Candy (acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built (2,000+ businesses, £2.5 billion combined turnover) give her a working library of how entrepreneurial behaviour actually feels day to day. Her Start Up Forever framework breaks the entrepreneurial mindset down into a small set of repeatable daily behaviours, which is what lets it survive contact with corporate hierarchy. The book was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month. She translates between two worlds that rarely speak the same language: founders running on instinct and customer obsession, and senior executives running on process and structure. Most speakers can describe one of those worlds; she has lived both. Her credibility on women-led growth is operating credibility, not advocacy. Buy Women Built is a commercial channel built with major retailers, and she co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce on growing SMEs. Biography highlights Co-founder, Coffee Republic; scaled to 110 stores and a £50 million market capitalisation Founder, Skinny Candy (50% acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built Author, Anyone Can Do It (Wiley, 2003) and Start Up Forever (Troubador, 2019, Financial Times Business Book of the Month) OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity, 2012 Birthday Honours Co-chair, UK government Scale Up Taskforce; board member, Scale Up Institute Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum Biography Coffee Republic opened on South Molton Street in 1995, the first US-style coffee bar chain in the UK. Within five years it ran 110 stores at a £50 million market capitalisation. Sahar Hashemi co-founded the business with her brother Bobby after leaving a career in law, and the speed of the build became the basis of everything she has worked on since. The question that has occupied her for two decades is why large companies struggle to act on what they already know. Most have the people, the capital and the data to behave entrepreneurially. They rarely behave that way in practice. Her book Start Up Forever, named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month, breaks that gap into a set of daily habits that survive inside corporate structure rather than dying in workshop rooms. The work has weight because it is grounded in three operating businesses she actually built, not consulting case studies. Skinny Candy, the sugar-free confectionery brand, was acquired by Glisten Plc. Buy Women Built, launched in 2020, now represents more than 2,000 women-built businesses with combined turnover above £2.5 billion and has become a working channel inside major UK retailers. She co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce and sits on the board of the Scale Up Institute. Senior teams at Microsoft, L’Oreal, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble and Sky have brought her in for the same reason: she gives a leadership group a usable answer to the question of what entrepreneurial behaviour looks like on a Tuesday afternoon at a 50,000-person company. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to the UK economy and to charity, and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurial mindset inside large organisations Innovation and creativity as everyday discipline Building start-up culture in established businesses Intrapreneurship and behaviour change at scale Women-led entrepreneurship and scale-up growth Customer obsession as a leadership behaviour Courage, action and the founder’s bias to start Ideal for Executive teams running innovation, transformation or culture-change programmes CHROs and learning leaders who want behaviour change, not awareness Strategy and growth leaders trying to build new businesses inside an existing one Sales, marketing and customer teams rebuilding around customer obsession Audience outcomes A practical model of entrepreneurial behaviour that translates into Monday-morning habits Specific examples of how founder instincts (customer obsession, bias to act, comfort with ambiguity) operate inside corporate structure A clearer view of why innovation programmes stall, and what to remove rather than add Renewed confidence in personal agency: what an individual contributor or senior leader can change without permission Frameworks from Start Up Forever that teams can apply to their own products, customers and decisions

Why organisations work with Rebecca Jane A founder story that is genuinely unusual: an all-female private investigation firm launched at twenty-four, scaled into national media coverage, and sold in 2018. Direct experience of running a consumer-facing business through personal upheaval, including divorce and the collapse of a previous property enterprise. A published HarperCollins memoir, The Real Lady Detective Agency, that gives the after-dinner content a documented spine rather than a stitched-together speech. Comfort with national audiences from sustained appearances on ITV’s This Morning, BBC Radio, Dragons’ Den and Big Brother, which translates into stage presence in front of large rooms. Biography highlights Founder of The Lady Detective Agency, established 2009, sold 2018. Author of The Real Lady Detective Agency: A True Story, HarperCollins, January 2013. Pitched on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, Series 10, 30 September 2012. Housemate on Channel 5’s Big Brother UK Series 18 in 2017. Regular national media contributor: The Daily Mail, Daily Star on Sunday, BBC Radio, ITV’s This Morning. Biography The Lady Detective Agency began in 2009 as a one-person operation in Lancashire. Rebecca Jane was twenty-four, recently divorced, and had just lost a property business. The agency went on to become one of the UK’s better-known female-led private investigation firms, with national newspaper coverage and broadcast features following within a few years. Her 2013 HarperCollins memoir The Real Lady Detective Agency set out the story in book form, including the surveillance work, the honey-trap operations and the personal arc that produced the company. The book is the spine of her speaking material and the source of most of the after-dinner content she now performs for corporate audiences. Television followed the publishing track. She pitched on Dragons’ Den in 2012, took part in Big Brother in 2017, and remained a regular on ITV’s This Morning and BBC Radio across the decade. The agency was sold in 2018, freeing her to work full-time on speaking, writing and media. What buyers get is a coherent founder narrative with a sellable arc: a young entrepreneur, an uncomfortable subject matter, a business built and exited, and a ten-year media career on top of it. The content is biographical rather than framework-driven, which is the basis on which to commission her. Key speaking topics Female entrepreneurship and start-up Personal resilience and recovery Building a business in an unconventional sector Media and public profile for founders Customer trust in sensitive consumer services Selling a founder-led business Ideal for Corporate after-dinner audiences looking for a strong personal story rather than an analytical keynote. Women-in-business networks and female founder events. Conferences on entrepreneurship, scale-up and exit, where a first-person account is wanted alongside expert speakers. Audience outcomes A first-hand account of what running a small consumer-facing business actually looks like through divorce and reinvention. A view of the UK private investigation sector from the inside, including how the agency was built and how it was eventually sold. A worked example of how national media exposure can be used by a founder to grow a small consumer brand. A motivational close grounded in a documented personal story rather than borrowed material.

Why organisations work with Randi Zuckerberg She created Facebook Live – a verifiable, specific product decision made inside one of the most consequential platform companies in history – giving her first-hand insight into how media formats shape audience behaviour at scale that no advisory role can replicate. Pick Three (2018) provides a named, counter-intuitive framework with a specific thesis: sustainable performance – individual and organisational – comes from deliberate daily prioritisation across five competing demands, not from attempting balance across all of them simultaneously. Her knowledge of how Facebook made its foundational decisions on elections, political partnerships, and live video predates the broader public and regulatory reckoning with platform power by nearly a decade – and comes from inside the decisions, not from observing them. Her active angel investment portfolio – 53% female founders, 30% diverse founders – means her perspective on digital entrepreneurship and media ventures is commercially current, not retrospective. Multiple Tony Award wins as a Broadway co-producer alongside a technology career demonstrates a consistent and applied understanding of commercial storytelling across very different formats and audience types – directly relevant to organisations trying to build brand authority rather than brand noise. Biography highlights One of the first ten employees at Facebook (2005–2011); Director of Market Development and Spokesperson Creator of Facebook Live, now used by more than two billion people globally Emmy nomination, 2011, for the pioneering integration of television and social media in U.S. midterm election coverage Founder and CEO, Zuckerberg Media (est. 2011); clients include the United Nations, Condé Nast, Clinton Global Initiative, and Cirque du Soleil New York Times bestselling author: Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (HarperCollins, 2013) and Pick Three: You Can Have It All (Just Not Every Day) (2018) Multiple Tony Award-winning Broadway co-producer, including Hadestown (Best Musical, 2019); also Drama Desk Award and Kidscreen Award Host, Randi Zuckerberg Means Business, SiriusXM; board member, Life360 BA in Psychology, Harvard University Biography Facebook Live was built by a team of fewer than ten people making decisions about media format, political partnerships, and audience engagement that nobody had made before. Randi Zuckerberg led that work. The choices her team made – about what live video could do for commercial storytelling, for political communication, for media partnerships – shaped how organisations and audiences interact in real time to this day. After leaving Facebook in 2011, she founded Zuckerberg Media, producing content and advisory work for organisations including the United Nations, Condé Nast, Cirque du Soleil, and the Clinton Global Initiative. The question her firm consistently addresses is strategic rather than technical: how does an organisation translate digital presence into an audience it actually owns, rather than one it rents from a platform? Her 2018 book Pick Three formalised a framework she had developed through practice. The argument is specific and deliberately counter-intuitive: sustainable performance – individual or organisational – does not come from balance across five competing demands (Work, Sleep, Family, Fitness, Friends). It comes from deliberate daily prioritisation of three. That specificity is what makes the framework usable in executive development conversations, rather than aspirational. Her Tony Award wins as Broadway co-producer, her weekly SiriusXM programme, and an angel investment portfolio with a deliberate diversity mandate are not incidental to her commercial thinking. They reflect the same underlying argument – that strategic storytelling, deployed with intent and discipline across different formats, builds audiences that advertising cannot replicate. Key speaking topics Digital media strategy and platform intelligence Entrepreneurship and venture building Commercial storytelling and brand media The creator economy and audience ownership Technology and society: the platform era in retrospect Productivity and prioritisation: the Pick Three framework Women in technology and entrepreneurship Ideal for CMOs, brand directors, and communications executives navigating digital media strategy and audience ownership Entrepreneurial leadership communities, founder networks, and innovation-focused executive programmes Executive teams building media presence as a commercial strategy rather than a communications function CHROs and leadership development leads running programmes on performance, prioritisation, and sustainable leadership Audience outcomes A clearer distinction between digital activity and digital strategy, grounded in how platform companies actually make decisions about media and audience Practical application of the Pick Three framework for daily prioritisation – applicable to individual performance, team leadership, and organisational resource allocation First-hand perspective on how media partnerships, content formats, and platform intelligence were developed inside Facebook during its most formative years A more operationally grounded view of the creator economy: what «owning your audience» actually requires versus what platforms provide Greater confidence in making active, deliberate trade-offs between competing strategic priorities rather than attempting to progress all of them simultaneously