Innovation & Disruption

Why organisations work with Uri Levine Two billion-dollar exits in the same category give him a working method, not a single-case story. Waze and Moovit were sold to Google and Intel using the same problem-first discipline he now teaches. His handbook Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution sets out a usable operating system for early-stage product, fundraising and hiring decisions. Steve Wozniak called it a bible for entrepreneurs. An active portfolio of 20-plus board seats and 50-plus advisory roles keeps his perspective current. He is reading live cap tables and product roadmaps, not recycling a 2013 exit. Levine teaches inside corporates as well as startups. The framing translates for innovation leaders trying to make corporate venturing and intrapreneurship behave more like founder-led businesses. Biography highlights Co-founder of Waze, acquired by Google in 2013 for approximately $1.1 billion. Early investor and board member at Moovit, acquired by Intel in 2020 for approximately $1 billion. Author of Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs (BenBella, 2023). Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Practice at IE University. Founder, chairman or board member at Pontera, FairFly, Refundit, SeeTree, Fibo and others; former Chairman of Zoomcar; independent board member at Infosys. Forbes contributor; interviewed in The New York Times, CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox News. Biography Waze and Moovit were built on the same wager. Drivers and commuters were the source of the data, the product, and the network effect, and the problem worth solving was the daily friction of getting somewhere. Google paid roughly $1.1 billion for the first company in 2013. Intel paid roughly another billion for the second in 2020. The method behind both exits is what Uri Levine now teaches. Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, published by BenBella in 2023, is the operating handbook he wrote for founders and the executives funding them. Steve Wozniak called it a bible for entrepreneurs. It covers product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, scaling internationally and exit decisions, treated as a sequence of choices a founder can get right or wrong. The portfolio behind the writing keeps the material current. Levine has founded nine companies, sat on roughly twenty boards including Infosys and HERE, and advised more than fifty startups. He chaired Zoomcar through its public listing in 2023 and returned as strategic and financial advisor in 2024. He teaches the same approach as Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at IE University and runs a workshop on building unicorns. For corporate audiences the value is structural. Innovation pipelines stall when teams pick solutions before they have stress-tested the problem. Levine’s argument, and the discipline behind it, gives senior leaders a way to challenge that habit inside their own organisations, whether they are running a venture arm, a transformation programme or a category business losing ground to insurgents. Key speaking topics Disruptive innovation and category creation Problem discovery and product-market fit Entrepreneurship and scaling to unicorn status Fundraising and investor strategy Corporate innovation and intrapreneurship Mobility and the future of transportation Founder leadership through hypergrowth Ideal for Founders and CEOs of growth-stage and scale-up businesses Corporate innovation, venture and transformation leaders Investors, LPs and board directors evaluating early-stage portfolios Senior leadership teams in incumbent categories under disruption pressure Audience outcomes A working test for whether a problem is large enough and clear enough to build a company around. Specific lessons from inside two unicorn exits on hiring, fundraising, international expansion and timing the sale. The mistakes Levine has watched founders and corporate innovators repeat across fifty advisory engagements, and how to spot them earlier. A sharper frame for board-level conversations about which bets to back, which to kill, and when to pivot.

Why organisations work with Tyler Brule He has built, sold, and continued to build international media brands across more than two decades, with Wallpaper* sold to Time Inc and Monocle scaled into print, radio, retail and bureaux across multiple cities. His agency Winkreative has shaped the visual and editorial identity of Swiss International Air Lines, Prada, American Express, BlackBerry, Bally and others, giving him a practitioner’s view on brand systems rather than a commentator’s. He offers a direct point of view on why print, physical retail, and curated journalism continue to command paying customers when the industry consensus says they should not. His Monocle platform reports from cities around the world on business, design, urbanism and soft power, giving senior audiences a global perspective grounded in on-the-ground reporting, not desk research. Biography highlights Founder of Wallpaper* (1996), sold to Time Inc in 1997. Founder of Winkreative (1998), a branding agency with clients including Swiss International Air Lines, Prada, American Express, Bally, Lexus, BlackBerry and Sky News. Founder, chairman and editor-in-chief of Monocle, launched in February 2007. Launched Konfekt in 2020, a Zurich-based quarterly aimed at female readers in English and German. Long-running “Fast Lane” columnist at the Financial Times Weekend. Recipient of the British Society of Magazine Editors’ Lifetime Achievement Award. Biography In 1996, a Canadian journalist recovering from a sniper injury sustained while reporting in Afghanistan took a small business loan and launched a style and design magazine. Wallpaper* became one of the defining publishing launches of the 1990s and was sold to Time Inc within a year. Most editors do this once. Brule did it twice. The second time, in 2007, the conditions were worse. Print was contracting and digital advertising was eating the industry. Monocle launched into that market as a global affairs, design and business title with high cover prices, physical retail shops, and bureaux in cities including Zurich, Tokyo and Hong Kong. It is now a media brand spanning print, Monocle 24 radio, online, retail, and Konfekt, a Zurich-based women’s title launched in 2020 for English and German-speaking markets. Alongside the publishing work, Winkreative has shaped the brand and editorial identity of Swiss International Air Lines after the collapse of Swissair, and worked with Prada, American Express, Bally, Lexus, BlackBerry, and others. That practitioner experience sits behind his commentary: he has actually built the kind of brand systems most speakers describe from the outside. For senior buyers, his value is a specific, contrarian point of view on where attention, loyalty, and paying audiences actually live, supported by a Monocle reporting platform that covers cities, soft power and consumer culture from bureaux on three continents. The British Society of Magazine Editors’ Lifetime Achievement Award sits in that context: recognition of a body of work in an industry that has consolidated around platforms he refused to use. Key speaking topics Brand building in saturated categories The future of media and paid content Design as commercial infrastructure Cities, soft power and the urban consumer Entrepreneurship in declining industries Editorial and customer experience Global trends and consumer culture Ideal for Boards and executive teams in consumer, luxury, media, hospitality, travel and retail Chief marketing, brand and customer officers reviewing brand identity and customer experience Founders and investors building category-defining consumer brands After-dinner and moderation work for senior international audiences Audience outcomes A practitioner’s view on what makes a brand worth paying for, drawn from Wallpaper*, Monocle and Winkreative A clearer sense of where attention and loyalty are actually building in consumer markets, not where the industry says they are A global, city-by-city read on design, retail and consumer behaviour, sourced from Monocle’s reporting bureaux A founder’s account of building media and brand businesses that run against the direction of their industry

Why organisations work with Tim Harford Translates economic and statistical research into commercial decisions, drawing on a Financial Times column that has run for nearly two decades and a body of ten published books. Brings credibility on numbers that very few speakers can match: Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and OBE for services to economic understanding. Reframes innovation as an evidence-based discipline grounded in adaptation and failure, the central thesis of “Adapt” and “Messy”, rather than the usual creativity rhetoric. Equips senior audiences to interrogate their own data culture using the rules from “How To Make The World Add Up”, a practical antidote to misleading statistics inside organisations. Trusted as a host, moderator and after-dinner speaker by serious audiences because his radio craft on “More or Less” and “Cautionary Tales” carries directly into the room. Biography highlights Senior columnist, Financial Times, writing “The Undercover Economist”. Presenter, BBC Radio 4’s “More or Less”, the long-running statistics-in-the-news programme. Host of “Cautionary Tales”, a Pushkin Industries podcast, and creator of “Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy”. Author of ten books, including “The Undercover Economist”, “Adapt”, “Messy”, “How To Make The World Add Up” and “The Truth Detective”. Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and of Brasenose College, Oxford; Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford. OBE for services to Improving Economic Understanding; winner of the Bastiat Prize (twice), the Wincott Journalist of the Year award, and the Royal Statistical Society award for journalistic excellence. Biography Most organisations claim to be evidence-led. Few are. Decisions are framed in numbers but driven by narrative, and innovation programmes routinely refuse to learn from the failures that contain the most useful information. Harford’s work, across the Financial Times column, ten books and two long-running BBC and Pushkin productions, has been built around exactly that gap. His books map the intellectual territory leaders care about. “The Undercover Economist” reframed everyday markets through the lens of price, scarcity and incentive, and has sold more than 1.5 million copies in thirty languages. “Adapt” and “Messy” argue that progress depends on disciplined trial, error and tolerance for disorder, a more honest account of innovation than most corporate playbooks allow. “How To Make The World Add Up” gives senior audiences a practical method for testing the numbers they are asked to act on. The credentials behind that work are unusual. Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, Associate Member of Nuffield College Oxford, an OBE for services to economic understanding, and a body of awards from the Bastiat Prize to the Wincott. As presenter of BBC Radio 4’s “More or Less”, Harford has spent years publicly stress-testing the statistics that shape policy and business commentary, which makes him one of the few speakers who can hold a senior room on data culture without resorting to platitudes. For boards and leadership teams, the value is concrete. Sharper questions about innovation portfolios, a working method for separating signal from noise, and a more honest model of how organisations actually learn. The recent “Cautionary Tales” series, which dissects high-profile organisational failures, has become a reference point for leaders thinking seriously about how decisions go wrong. Key speaking topics Behavioural economics in commercial decision-making Innovation, adaptation and learning from failure Statistical literacy and data culture in organisations Economic forces shaping business and policy Creativity, disorder and team productivity Cognitive bias and judgement under uncertainty Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting decisions where the numbers are contested Strategy, innovation and R&D leaders building portfolios under uncertainty CFOs and finance functions reviewing how evidence is presented and challenged internally Senior leadership offsites where the brief calls for serious intellectual content with broad relevance Audience outcomes A working method for interrogating statistics and management dashboards before acting on them A clearer model of innovation as managed trial and error, with practical implications for portfolio choice Sharper recognition of the cognitive errors that recur in senior decision-making Concrete references from “Cautionary Tales” and “More or Less” that audiences can use to reframe their own debates

Why organisations work with Tim Cole He has been writing about the commercial internet since 1995, before most of the people now running digital programmes were in the workforce, and that long lens lets him separate genuine inflection points from cyclical hype. AI Means Business and The Power of Digital Transformation are written for non-technical managers, which is the constituency most companies actually need to move. He pitches at the board, not at the engineering org. As editor-in-chief of Smart Industry, he has continuous visibility into how Industry 4.0, IoT and cognitive computing are being deployed inside European manufacturers, which makes his examples concrete rather than aspirational. His “Wild Wild Web” argument on platform power and digital ethics gives boards a coherent way to think about regulation, sovereignty and the GAFA dependency without slipping into either techno-utopianism or moral panic. Bilingual operating fluency in English and German, with thirty years of context on the German Mittelstand and on European identity and security debates, where most American voices are weak. Biography highlights Editor-in-chief, Smart Industry – the IoT Business Magazine, since 2016. Former editor of Net Investor; long-running columnist for FAZ, VDI-Nachrichten, Der Standard and IX. Author of around a dozen books on the digital economy, including Success Factor Internet (Econ), Digital Enlightenment Now! with Ossi Urchs, The Power of Digital Transformation (Carl Hanser), Wild Wild West (2018) and AI Means Business (2020). One of Germany’s earliest internet journalists; began blogging in 1995, decades before most European business commentators took the medium seriously. Bilingual American journalist based in Germany for over four decades, working in English and German across keynotes, moderation and TV. Subject-matter focus across digital transformation, digital ethics, identity management, IT security, IoT and applied AI. Biography The questions European boards are asking about AI and digital transformation in 2026 are the questions Tim Cole has been writing about, in long form, since 1995. Success Factor Internet came out in 1999. The Power of Digital Transformation and AI Means Business came later, but the through line is the same: how does a real company, with a real cost base and real customers, actually change. That long view is the asset. As editor-in-chief of Smart Industry, the IoT business magazine, Cole has spent the last decade watching European manufacturers attempt the leap from connected sensors to operating advantage, and reporting on what worked and what stalled. The book Wild Wild West compares today’s platform giants to the 19th-century robber barons of the American frontier and argues that the absence of a digital social contract is now a board-level risk, not a policy abstraction. His audience is the non-technical manager. The books are written for executives who have to make capital allocation calls on AI, IoT and platform strategy without being engineers, and who need a clear-eyed account of what the technology can and cannot do. He is direct on limitations and risk, which is unusual in this field, and he writes from inside the European debate on identity, security and digital sovereignty rather than importing a Silicon Valley frame. Bilingual in English and German, Cole has worked across journalism, broadcasting and analyst-adjacent roles for more than thirty years. He brings to a board conversation the rare combination of an American writer’s directness, a German operator’s pragmatism, and three decades of accumulated context on what actually changes when technology meets a P&L. Key speaking topics Digital transformation for non-technical leaders Artificial intelligence in business Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 Digital ethics and the social contract of the internet Platform power, GAFA and digital sovereignty IT security and digital identity management Cognitive computing and predictive analysis The future of the European Mittelstand in a digital economy Ideal for Boards and executive committees of European industrial and Mittelstand companies confronting AI and IoT investment decisions CIOs, CDOs and transformation leads who need a credible non-technical voice to align the rest of the executive team CISOs and identity-management functions briefing boards on cyber and digital sovereignty Industry conferences on manufacturing, IoT, Industry 4.0 and applied AI Audience outcomes A grounded read on which AI and digital transformation moves are real operating advantage and which are still vendor narrative. A working vocabulary for board-level conversations about platform power, digital ethics and digital sovereignty. Concrete examples drawn from European industrial and Mittelstand companies, not recycled Silicon Valley case studies. A clearer sense of where IoT and Industry 4.0 investment is actually paying back, and where it is stuck in pilot. A frame for talking about AI’s limits as well as its potential, in language a non-technical executive team can use.

Why organisations work with Terry Virts He has held command in an environment where a missed checklist item ends a mission. That experience reframes what risk discipline looks like inside a corporate operating model. His ISS tour was a multinational, multilingual command, including Russian, American, and European crew members during a politically tense period. He speaks credibly to leaders managing cross-border teams under strain. He filmed A Beautiful Planet from orbit and authored View From Above with National Geographic. The visual material is a working asset for keynote audiences, not a slideshow. The 2019 One More Orbit polar circumnavigation is a current, civilian, board-relevant case study in mission planning, contingency design, and small-team execution. He writes and speaks fluently on the practical content of command, not the metaphor of it. His book How to Astronaut is the operating manual version of his keynote material. Biography highlights Retired NASA astronaut, US Air Force colonel, and former F-16 test pilot with over 5,300 flight hours across 40-plus aircraft types. Pilot of STS-130 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour, 2010. Commander of the International Space Station, Expedition 43, with 200 days in orbit and three spacewalks. Author of View From Above (National Geographic, 2017) and How to Astronaut (Workman Publishing, 2020). Lead astronaut cinematographer on the IMAX feature A Beautiful Planet, narrated by Jennifer Lawrence. Captain of the One More Orbit crew that set the FAI- and Guinness-certified world record for fastest pole-to-pole circumnavigation of Earth in July 2019. Biography A space station does not forgive a poorly briefed handover. Six people from three countries, in a structure travelling at 17,500 miles per hour, run on a checklist culture so disciplined it sounds bureaucratic until it saves a life. Terry Virts commanded that environment for Expedition 43, and the reason serious organisations book him is that the discipline travels. His route into that command is the spine of credibility. US Air Force Academy in Mathematics, F-16 pilot, test pilot, NASA selection in 2000, pilot of Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-130, then 200 days aboard the ISS with three spacewalks and the command of a multinational crew. A General Management Program at Harvard Business School in 2011 sits in the middle of that arc, which matters: he reads commercial decision-making in the language an executive audience uses. The post-NASA work is where the speaking proposition sharpens. He photographed and filmed the ISS for the IMAX feature A Beautiful Planet, published View From Above with National Geographic, and wrote How to Astronaut for Workman in 2020. In 2019, he led the One More Orbit crew that circled the planet over both poles in 46 hours 40 minutes, setting the FAI- and Guinness-certified world record. It is a civilian mission with a board-room shape: small team, hard constraint, narrow window. What sets Virts apart from the broader astronaut speaker pool is how specific his operational material is. He does not deliver awe. He delivers the structure beneath the awe, which is what senior teams come for. Key speaking topics Crisis leadership and command decision-making Risk discipline in high-consequence operations Cross-cultural team leadership under pressure Mission planning and contingency design Lessons from human spaceflight for executive teams Innovation in extreme environments Earth observation and the climate perspective from orbit Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and operating leaders running businesses with high-consequence decisions Boards and executive committees focused on crisis preparedness and operational resilience Senior teams managing cross-border or multinational workforces under political strain Aerospace, defence, energy, and engineering leadership audiences Audience outcomes A working model of how command-grade decision discipline operates when checklists run out A clearer view of what risk leadership looks like in environments where errors are irreversible Concrete examples of multinational team management under sustained operational stress A perspective on Earth, climate, and human capability that lifts the room without softening the argument

Why organisations work with Sydney Finkelstein His work is grounded in two decade-long research programmes: one into executive failure, published as Why Smart Executives Fail, and one into talent-generating leaders, published as Superbosses. Both give clients an evidence base that a typical leadership keynote does not. As Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth Tuck and Director of the Tuck Executive Program, he is embedded in the executive development the organisations he speaks to actually attend. Thinkers50 recognition, Fellowship of the Academy of Management, and multiple Best Paper Awards provide the independent external validation that boards and chief people officers look for before investing in a headline speaker. His client list, including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz, means his material has been tested in front of some of the same leadership teams his audiences sit in. He presents research-heavy material in plain English, a point the Wall Street Journal called out explicitly in its review of Why Smart Executives Fail. Biography highlights Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College Director of the Tuck Executive Program Author of Superbosses (Penguin Portfolio, 2016) and Why Smart Executives Fail (Penguin Portfolio, 2003), among 20-plus books and 90-plus articles Thinkers50 ranked management thinker Fellow of the Academy of Management; Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Awards (1997, 2004) Regular BBC contributor; consulting clients including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz Biography Why executives fail is a more answerable question than most organisations assume. Sydney Finkelstein’s career has been built around answering it. As Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and Director of the Tuck Executive Program, he has spent two decades combining academic rigour with the specifics of named corporate failures, a body of work that is now a standard reference in leadership and strategy literature. Why Smart Executives Fail, published in 2003 by Penguin Portfolio, remains the book that sets out the diagnostic pattern. The Wall Street Journal described it as «a marvel, a jargon-free business book based on serious research». His subsequent book, Superbosses, took the opposite question, why some leaders produce more outstanding talent than their peers, and spent ten years answering it through figures ranging from Ralph Lauren, Lorne Michaels and George Lucas to hedge fund founder Julian Robertson and chef Alice Waters. The thesis has since shaped how senior HR and CEO succession teams think about talent generation at the top of organisations. Finkelstein is one of the recurring names on the Thinkers50 list, a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the recipient of multiple Academy of Management Executive Best Paper Awards in 1997 and 2004. His writing extends beyond books to more than 90 articles, and he contributes regularly to the BBC. The consulting and speaking work sits with organisations including American Express, Barclays, Boeing, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, Glaxo and Heinz. For boards and executive teams facing difficult succession, integration or leadership-change questions, the useful thing about Finkelstein is the combination of research archive and plain-language delivery. He arrives with frameworks his audiences have probably read in HBR, but with the corporate case material to apply them without slipping into abstraction. Key speaking topics Why smart executives fail Superbosses and talent-generating leadership Leadership decision-making under pressure Strategic renewal and «built to change» organisations Succession, talent pipelines and HR strategy for the C-suite Innovation leadership Ideal for Boards, CEOs and executive committees working through succession, turnaround or post-M&A leadership decisions CHROs and heads of executive development designing senior leadership and succession programmes Corporate universities and executive education programmes looking for a Thinkers50 headliner with teaching credentials Industry conferences and CEO summits where research-grade leadership content is expected Audience outcomes A specific framework for identifying the decision patterns that precede executive failure The Superbosses model of talent generation, translated into practical leadership behaviours Named case material drawn from high-profile corporate failures and successes, usable in the audience’s own context Reference points that connect academic research with clients including American Express, Barclays, Boeing and GE A sharper view of the link between leadership behaviour, talent pipeline and long-run organisational performance

Why organisations work with Steve Wozniak He is the only living engineer who designed both the Apple I and Apple II from scratch – making him the sole speaker who can give an unmediated, first-hand account of the technical and creative decisions that launched the personal computer industry, not a retelling of someone else’s story. His account of innovation is engineering-first, not strategy-first: the Apple II preceded the business plan, not the other way round. That distinction gives organisations a direct counterpoint to the assumption that great products are the output of structured innovation programmes. The National Medal of Technology (1985) and the Heinz Award for Technology, The Economy and Employment (2000) – awarded specifically for “single-handedly designing the first personal computer” – are among the most rigorously assessed technology honours in the United States, and are publicly verifiable by any due-diligence process. His three decades of direct involvement in technology education – from adopting a school district to co-founding Woz U in 2017 – extend his argument about curiosity-driven invention into how organisations build and develop technical talent, not just how they manage innovation strategy. His signature format is a moderated conversation, not a fixed keynote: organisations set the agenda, and Wozniak engages directly with the specific challenges the audience brings. The result is different from – and harder to replicate than – a pre-packaged talk. Biography highlights Sole engineer on the Apple I (1976) and Apple II (1977); listed as sole inventor on four Apple patents National Medal of Technology, 1985 – awarded by President Ronald Reagan, jointly with Steve Jobs, for the development and introduction of the personal computer ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 1979; Heinz Award for Technology, The Economy and Employment, 2000; National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee, 2000 Computer History Museum Fellow, 1998 Author of iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon (W.W. Norton, 2006) – a New York Times bestselling autobiography BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley; co-founded Woz U in 2017, a postsecondary software engineering and technology training platform Founding sponsor of the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose and The Tech Interactive, Silicon Valley’s technology museum Biography The Apple II was built by one engineer, on his own time, because the problem interested him. Steve Wozniak had no brief, no product committee, and no market research – just an engineering puzzle he found compelling. That creative condition is what produced the personal computer industry, and it is what Wozniak has spent decades trying to explain and, through his education work, replicate. That engineering-first perspective sets his account apart from those who discuss innovation as a strategic discipline. The Apple II preceded the business, not the other way round. Its colour graphics, integrated keyboard, and floppy disk drive were engineering decisions, not market-research conclusions. The product that launched a global industry was a technical artefact made by a person who loved making things. That distinction matters to any organisation asking why its own innovation efforts consistently underperform. The recognition that followed has been rigorous and specific. Wozniak received the National Medal of Technology in 1985 – jointly with Steve Jobs, for the development and introduction of the personal computer – the highest honour for technological achievement awarded by the United States government. The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recognised his contributions in 1979. In 2000, the Heinz Award for Technology, The Economy and Employment cited him explicitly for designing the first personal computer and redirecting his work toward education. He holds four Apple patents and is a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. His commitment to education has been sustained and direct. He adopted the Los Gatos School District, co-founded Woz U in 2017 to expand access to software engineering training, and has taught computer literacy in classrooms. His autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon (W.W. Norton, 2006), was a New York Times bestseller. His BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley was completed years after Apple had already become a global company – a fact that says something about what he values and why. Key speaking topics Engineering-led innovation and market creation The founding of Apple Computer Entrepreneurial thinking inside large organisations The origins of the personal computer industry Robotics, AI, and automation Technology education and technical talent development Creative freedom and engineering culture Ideal for CEOs and board-level audiences examining why large-organisation innovation consistently underperforms relative to investment CTOs, Chief Innovation Officers, and engineering leadership teams seeking a primary-source perspective on invention rather than innovation methodology Corporate innovation programmes and R&D functions looking to ground strategy in engineering-first thinking Technology and digital transformation conferences requiring a speaker whose credibility is structural, not positional Audience outcomes A first-hand account of the technical decisions and working conditions that produced the Apple I and Apple II – the machines that defined personal computing A clearer understanding of why genuine invention tends to emerge from curiosity and freedom rather than process and planning cycles Practical perspective on what organisations can do – and stop doing – to allow engineering talent and technical curiosity to produce commercially significant results Insight into the relationship between education, hands-on technical skill, and the kind of innovation that creates new industries rather than improves existing ones Exposure to a model of entrepreneurship that began with engineering before it had a business – and what that sequence reveals about how lasting technology companies are actually built

Why organisations work with Steve Faktor He works from a proprietary, named methodology, the 4C’s of Innovation™, developed inside Fortune 100 innovation programmes at American Express, Citi and MasterCard, not adapted from case studies of others’ work. His operating record is concrete. As head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, he launched commercial products including Zync, LoyaltyEdge, and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. His 9 Corporate Personality Types™, the viral Forbes piece picked up by NPR, gives audiences a working tool for diagnosing why innovation initiatives die inside specific corporate cultures. He carries a 750,000-strong LinkedIn following from his status as one of the platform’s original 160 Influencers, alongside figures like Richard Branson. Buyers hiring him get a futurist whose calls are public and dated. The voice in Econovation, sharp and satirical, is the same voice on stage. Senior leaders get an honest read on innovation work without the consultant gloss. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of IdeaFaktory, the innovation incubator behind multiple $100M+ businesses for Fortune 100 brands, built on its proprietary 4C’s of Innovation™ process. Former Vice President of Growth and Innovation and Head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, where he launched Zync, LoyaltyEdge and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. Former SVP of Innovation and Growth Ventures at Citigroup; senior strategy and innovation executive at MasterCard; former management consultant at Arthur Andersen. Author of Econovation: The Red, White, and Blue Pill for Arousing Innovation (Wiley, 2011). Forbes and Harvard Business Review contributor; one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following. Host of The Trendaddy show; media credits include The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Bloomberg Radio and MSNBC. Graduate of NYU Stern School of Business. Biography At American Express, the Chairman’s Innovation Fund came with a $50M budget and a brief to launch new businesses inside the company. Steve Faktor ran it. Out of that role came Zync, LoyaltyEdge and a Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. The same period produced the methodology he has since codified as the 4C’s of Innovation™: context, creativity, capabilities and culture. That methodology is the operating logic he now applies through IdeaFaktory, the innovation firm he founded after leaving AmEx. IdeaFaktory has helped Fortune 100 clients launch multiple $100M+ businesses by partnering with vetted startups and rebuilding their internal innovation programmes from the culture out. The ‘culture out’ part matters. His viral Forbes piece on the 9 Corporate Personality Types, picked up by NPR, came from watching innovation initiatives die at the hands of identifiable, predictable internal characters. Faktor’s second strand of work is futurist. Econovation (Wiley, 2011) argued that consumerism was ending and producerism was emerging, with economic value shifting to those who make rather than those who consume. As one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following and Forbes and Harvard Business Review columns, he has built more than a decade of dated, public predictions clients can audit. In a boardroom, both strands earn their seat. Senior teams get a working framework rooted in real product P&Ls, the AmEx ones with his name on them, not someone else’s case studies. They also get a voice that has been right enough, often enough, in public, that buyers can audit the work before they commission it. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and methodology Corporate-startup partnerships and commercialisation Growth strategy in financial services and consumer goods Futurism and trend forecasting Innovation culture and corporate change Business model innovation Digital commerce, payments and loyalty Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and Heads of Strategy in Fortune 500 firms whose innovation programmes have plateaued at pilot stage. Growth and commercial leadership teams in financial services, payments and consumer goods evaluating where to commit capital next. Boards and executive committees commissioning a candid, externally validated read on internal innovation capability. Founders and corporate venture teams looking for an operator’s view of how large enterprises actually make buying decisions. Audience outcomes A specific diagnostic for why their innovation programmes are stalling, anchored to the 4C’s of Innovation™. A working vocabulary for the cultural archetypes that block or enable change inside large organisations, drawn from the 9 Corporate Personality Types. A view of which trends in technology, economics and consumer behaviour are most likely to disrupt their P&L over the next five to ten years. A short list of the highest-leverage moves a senior team can make to convert innovation budget into commercial product launches.

Why organisations work with Steve Blank Co-creator of the Lean Startup methodology, the operating logic most corporate innovation programmes are now built on, taught by the person who designed it. His Lean LaunchPad curriculum became the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and U.S. Department of Energy. Co-founder of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense programme and the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, with direct experience deploying innovation methodology inside the U.S. defence and intelligence community. Twenty-one years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, with four IPOs including E.piphany. He built what he teaches before he taught it. Named one of 12 Masters of Innovation by Harvard Business Review and listed on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers. Biography highlights Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University. Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owner’s Manual, and Hacking for Defense: Innovation Doctrine. May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” defined the field. Co-founder of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation; served on the Defense Business Board and the U.S. Navy’s Science and Technology Advisory Board. Lean LaunchPad class taught at 75+ universities globally; Hacking for Defense at 70+, with more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in follow-on funding. Eight Silicon Valley startups across 21 years, four IPOs, including E.piphany, Zilog, MIPS and SuperMac. Biography Startups search for a business model. Large companies execute one. Conflating the two is what makes most corporate innovation programmes underperform: they apply planning, forecasting and accountability tools designed for known businesses to activities that are inherently exploratory. Steve Blank’s argument, developed across two foundational books and a 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, is that innovation has to be run as a managed discipline with its own operating logic. The Lean Startup methodology he co-created treats new ventures as a search process, where customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products replace the business plan as the primary instrument of decision-making. His credibility on this is built from doing the work, not just teaching it. He spent 21 years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, four of which went public, including E.piphany. He then took the same methodology into the U.S. federal system: his Lean LaunchPad curriculum was adopted by the National Science Foundation as I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and Department of Energy. His Hacking for Defense programme, co-founded at Stanford with Joe Felter and Peter Newell, has produced more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in funding. He teaches at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, advises the Department of Defense, and co-founded Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Harvard Business Review has named him one of 12 Masters of Innovation; Thinkers50 ranked him among the global top 50. The reason corporate audiences book him is straightforward: he is one of very few people who has built innovation processes that work inside the most rigid bureaucracies in existence, and he can show a senior team how to do the same. Key speaking topics Lean Startup methodology Corporate innovation at scale Customer development and business model search Entrepreneurship Disruption and incumbent response Innovation inside government and defence Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and corporate venture leaders Boards and executive teams designing or resetting innovation programmes Government and defence leaders responsible for technology adoption and commercialisation Founders, scale-up CEOs and corporate accelerator leadership Audience outcomes A working distinction between executing a known business model and searching for a new one, with the implications for how each should be resourced, measured and led. The operating logic behind customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products as decision-making instruments inside large organisations. Examples from the Lean LaunchPad, NSF I-Corps and Hacking for Defense programmes showing how the methodology has been deployed at federal scale. A diagnostic for why most corporate innovation programmes produce pilots and proofs-of-concept without commercial outcomes.

Why organisations work with Stefan Hyttfors He translates AI, climate and geopolitical signals into the specific operating choices a board actually has to make, rather than leaving leaders with a trend deck. His thesis in Yoga for Leaders connects disruptive technology to human behaviour, which gives the room a usable language for the cultural side of transformation, not just the technology side. Two-time Swedish Speaker of the Year, with more than 1,000 engagements across 40+ countries, including IKEA, Microsoft, H&M, Spotify, Deloitte and AstraZeneca. A journalist’s instinct for narrative means complex foresight content lands with senior, mixed-discipline audiences without being diluted. Nordic register, low on hype, high on argument, which suits boards that have already heard the standard Silicon Valley futurism pitch and want something sharper. Biography highlights Author of Yoga for Leaders: How to manage self-disruption in a world of self-destruction, LID Publishing, 2016. Twice named Swedish Speaker of the Year by Talarforum. TEDx speaker, including “We don’t need jobs” (TEDxArendal) and “Can we really trust human intelligence?” (TEDxStockholm). Former photo journalist at Expressen and Photo Editor-in-Chief at a Swedish daily; trained economist. Co-founder of Swedish PR agency Wenderfalck. Client roster includes IKEA, Microsoft, Klarna, Spotify, H&M, Deloitte, AstraZeneca, Gartner, Ericsson, BMW, Toyota, Unilever, Nike, Skanska and E.ON. Biography Most organisations still treat foresight as a forecasting exercise. The default question is what is going to happen, and the default output is a slide of trends. The harder question, what kind of organisation can keep deciding well when the trend lines stop being reliable, is the one Stefan Hyttfors works on with leadership teams across Europe. His thesis is that disruption is misread when it is treated as a purely technological event. In Yoga for Leaders: How to manage self-disruption in a world of self-destruction, published by LID in 2016, he sets technology alongside human behaviour and argues that the binding constraint on adaptation is rarely the tool, it is the mind of the leader using it. That argument has carried into his current work on AI, climate, and geopolitical instability, where he frames the leadership task as composure under accelerating change rather than mastery of any single trend. The credibility sits on volume and range. More than a thousand keynotes across forty-plus countries, twice named Swedish Speaker of the Year by Talarforum, TEDx talks at Arendal and Stockholm, and a client list that runs from IKEA, H&M and Spotify to Microsoft, Deloitte and AstraZeneca. His training as a journalist and economist shows in how the material is built: trend data on one side, behavioural and cultural argument on the other, no filler in between. What buyers tend to single out is the tone. Hyttfors is sceptical of futurism that sells inevitability, and equally sceptical of leadership content that ignores the technology shift underneath. The talk lands as a working brief for the next twelve months, not a prediction about 2035. Key speaking topics Strategic foresight under accelerating change Artificial intelligence and the future of work Digital transformation and behavioural change Leadership in unstable conditions Sustainability and climate as strategic variables Disruptive technology and business model change Trust as a commercial differentiator Ideal for Board and ExCo offsites setting direction under AI, climate and geopolitical uncertainty CHRO and CPO audiences re-scoping workforce strategy around AI capability CSO and strategy leadership teams refreshing planning assumptions for the next cycle Industry conferences in financial services, technology, industrials and consumer where future-of-business framing anchors the programme Audience outcomes A working language for distinguishing signal from noise across AI, climate and geopolitical shifts A clearer view of where their own organisation is over-indexed on predictability and under-indexed on adaptive capacity A behavioural read on why transformation programmes stall, beyond the usual technology or governance explanations Specific prompts for the conversations the leadership team should be having internally in the next two quarters

Why organisations work with Seth Godin The permission marketing framework, first articulated in 1999, anticipated the mechanics now encoded in GDPR, email consent law, and the inbound marketing movement. Organisations working with Godin are drawing on the original source, not a derivative Purple Cow provides a genuinely testable argument: remarkability must be designed into the product or service from the outset, not applied as a marketing layer afterwards: a direct challenge to most organisations’ R&D and go-to-market sequencing His body of work spans 21 bestsellers over three decades with a consistent intellectual thread; buyers are not engaging with a single-thesis speaker, but with someone whose thinking has proved durable across multiple market cycles Inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame (2018), the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame (2013), and the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame – the only person known to hold all three – giving him third-party validation across the full spectrum of marketing practice His daily blog, running for over 25 years without interruption, is itself a proof point for the compounding value of consistent, permission-based communication: a lived demonstration of the principle he teaches Biography highlights Author of 21 international bestsellers translated into 38+ languages, including Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribes, Linchpin, This Is Marketing, and This Is Strategy (2024 National Bestseller) Originator of the «permission marketing» and «interruption marketing» frameworks (1999), now foundational to digital marketing, CRM practice, and consent regulation worldwide Founder of Yoyodyne, a pioneering permission-marketing company sold to Yahoo! in 1998; served as Yahoo!’s VP of Direct Marketing post-acquisition Inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame (AMA New York, 2018), the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame (2013), and the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA in computer science and philosophy, Tufts University Founder of the altMBA, an intensive online leadership and decision-making workshop Five TED Talks; author of one of the most-read daily business blogs in the world Biography Seth Godin sold his first company, Yoyodyne, to Yahoo! in 1998 for $29.6 million. It was a permission marketing business: built around the then-contrarian argument that reaching people who had consented to hear from you was worth more than reaching vastly more people who had not. That argument is now the structural basis of email marketing, CRM, and data consent regulation across most markets. His 1999 book Permission Marketing named the framework and introduced its counterpart: interruption marketing, the logic of buying attention from people who did not want to give it. The book’s central claim – that anticipated, personal, relevant communication outperforms volume-based reach at every commercial stage – has proved more durable than most marketing theory of its era. HubSpot built a software category around a version of it. GDPR made it legally mandatory. The same structural argument runs through his subsequent work. Purple Cow made the case that a product worth noticing is the precondition for marketing worth running. Tribes reframed leadership as community-building rather than hierarchy. This Is Strategy, published in 2024 and a US National Bestseller, gives organisations a practical framework for distinguishing between long-term systems thinking and reactive planning. Each book refines the same underlying question: what does it actually take to earn the attention and trust of people who have a choice? He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a degree in computer science and philosophy from Tufts University. Inducted into three marketing halls of fame and the author of 21 international bestsellers, Godin writes a daily blog that has run without interruption for over 25 years; a compounding body of public intellectual work that few business writers at any level have matched. Key speaking topics Permission-based marketing and opt-in engagement Market differentiation and the logic of remarkability Strategy, systems thinking, and long-term planning Tribe leadership and community-driven growth Creative practice and the discipline of shipping work The economics of attention in overcrowded markets Climate communication and collaborative action Ideal for CMOs and brand leadership teams rethinking acquisition and retention strategy CEOs and senior strategy leads pressure-testing their differentiation logic Founders and growth-stage leaders building category identity Boards and executive teams resetting planning frameworks in volatile conditions Audience outcomes A working understanding of the permission marketing framework and how it applies to current customer acquisition and retention strategy A testable argument for why remarkability must precede marketing investment, not follow it Practical framing for the difference between short-term attention tactics and long-term trust-building Exposure to the systems-thinking approach in This Is Strategy, useful for teams that confuse tactics with strategy A challenge to default assumptions about reach, volume, and interruption as commercial levers

Why organisations work with Sebastian Thrun He has shipped autonomous AI at production scale. The Stanford team he led won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, and the Google self-driving project he co-founded became Waymo. He built the playbook that boards now ask about. Google X, founded under his leadership, codified moonshot methodology for capital-intensive technology bets. He has direct experience reskilling enterprise workforces in AI, data and cloud through Udacity, including programmes for IBM, Mercedes-Benz and Google before the 2024 acquisition by Accenture. He explains AI without dumbing it down. Senior audiences leave with a working sense of what current systems can and cannot do, and where the real operational risk sits. Biography highlights Co-founder of Google X and the Google self-driving car project that became Waymo Led the Stanford Racing Team whose vehicle Stanley won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge; Stanley now sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History Co-founder and chairman of Udacity, acquired by Accenture in 2024 to power the LearnVantage reskilling platform Co-founder and former CEO of Kitty Hawk, the eVTOL “flying car” company backed by Larry Page Member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina; Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award (Education, 2012) Co-author of Probabilistic Robotics (MIT Press), the standard graduate text on the mathematics behind autonomous systems Biography Stanley crossed the finish line of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge after 132 miles of desert, the first autonomous vehicle to do so. The Stanford Racing Team that built it was led by Sebastian Thrun, then director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Stanley now sits in the Smithsonian. The technology grew into Waymo and the modern autonomous vehicle industry. That arc, from research lab to production AI, is what makes his perspective valuable to senior teams. He gave up tenure at Stanford to become a Google Fellow, co-founded Google X, and built the moonshot model that boards now reference when they talk about long-horizon technology bets. Probabilistic Robotics, the textbook he co-authored with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, remains the standard graduate reference in the field. The second half of his career addresses the constraint that most boards now feel acutely. Talent. Udacity, which he co-founded in 2012, built the Nanodegree model with employers including IBM, Mercedes-Benz and Google, then sold to Accenture in 2024 to anchor the LearnVantage reskilling platform. He also co-founded Kitty Hawk with Larry Page to commercialise eVTOL aircraft. Audiences get something specific from him. A clear read on what current AI systems do well, where they fail, what production deployment actually requires, and how to build a workforce that can operate the technology rather than admire it. Key speaking topics Production AI and autonomous systems Moonshot methodology and long-horizon technology bets AI workforce reskilling and the talent constraint The future of mobility and self-driving vehicles AI for the board and the executive committee Online learning and the economics of education Ideal for Boards and executive committees moving from AI strategy to operating deployment CHROs and CLOs commissioning enterprise reskilling at scale Automotive, mobility and industrial leadership teams facing autonomy CTOs and chief AI officers benchmarking moonshot and R&D portfolios Audience outcomes A working mental model of where current AI systems succeed and where they fail in production A concrete view of the workforce capability required to run AI inside a large organisation A read on how moonshot bets are structured, governed and shut down inside a serious technology company A clearer sense of where autonomy is heading in mobility, logistics and adjacent sectors