Keynotes and track talks by corporate speakers from different industries and leading academic experts
Presentations are short and mostly take place in tracks. This enables attendees to stay focused on their key interests and challenges. Each day includes more time for interaction than presentation in order to ensure high levels of energy and exchange.
Chief People Officer
Nokia
After heading Nokia’s HR function for a year, Stephanie extended her scope: as the Chief People Officer (CPO), she is now responsible for all people-related topics at Nokia, including HR, real estate and health & safety, to provide a supportive working environment for all employees and enable them to thrive. The service portfolio of her organization includes all related services, including learning services for external customers. In addition, her team is responsible for the management and transformation of Nokia’s operating model.
Stephanie has over 20 years of experience at Nokia and in the telecommunications industry. She first joined Nokia in 1996 in China as part of her diploma studies, before joining the HR organization in Germany as an HR consultant and a permanent employee in 1998. Since then, she has held various HR positions globally across Nokia Siemens Networks and Nokia.
Stephanie holds a diploma in applied business languages (Chinese) and international business studies from the University of Applied Sciences, Bremen, in Germany.
Stephanie is a German native and is based in Espoo, Finland. When she is not working, she likes to relax with her family and friends. A true cosmopolitan, she is interested in a wide range of topics and enjoys traveling and reading.
Nokia’s HR is on the journey of transforming itself into a service provider. In parallel to its own transformation, HR is driving the change to decentralize all corporate functions and make business groups autonomous and fully P&L responsible. Stephanie Werner-Dietz will talk about both transformations, and share experiences and initial learnings on the journey.
Global Chief People Officer, AWS Professional Services
Amazon Web Services
Since 2019, Eric Tachibana has been the global Chief People Officer for the Professional Services organization at Amazon Web Services. In this role, Eric helps large enterprise customers across Asia with the organizational transformations necessary to deliver maximum benefits from the Cloud Operating Model and supports AWS teams with hiring, training, and culture at scale. From 2014 – 2018, Eric was the Professional Services lead for APAC, Japan, and China.
Previous to his role at Amazon, Eric was the Asia Pacific COO for UBS, across the Investment Banking, Wealth Management, and Asset Management Chief Technology Office where he was responsible for Innovation Management, Enterprise Architecture & Strategy, and Enterprise Social Networks. Before UBS, Eric was with Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he served as APAC Technology and Operations COO and was responsible for Innovation Management, Business Management, Risk & Compliance, and Employee Engagement.
Prior to his years in banking, Eric was an entrepreneur, focusing on the financial services space for over 14 years - creating, building, and eventually exiting, successful small and mid-sized companies in Silicon Valley, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the U.K. Today Tachibana continues his entrepreneurial endeavors as a regional angel investor, strategic adviser, and mentor for young, developing entrepreneurs, serving as founding non-executive advisor for 7 companies ranging from IT, to F&B, to retail/fashion and as Program Advisor for the DBS Bank HotSpot Accelerator.
Eric is also an author of 8 books on technology development and innovation management and continues to earn regional industry recognition as an adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore and Thammasat University business schools.
Eric Tachibana will lead a lab on culture transformation. He will start the lab off with an introduction to Amazon’s culture and a deep dive into the organization’s approach to culture change. This will be followed by group discussion.
Lab participants will learn the following:
Eric Tachibana will talk about how Amazon’s culture supports innovation. He will discuss how key manifestations of culture fuse together to create a strong culture of innovation. Eric will share insights on:
Rebecca Koch will discuss why agile HR is key to supporting the business and creating impact. She will detail her approach to drive HR’s agile transformation and new ways of working at DB Schenker. Rebecca will share insights on:
Chief Human Resources Officer, United Kingdom & Ireland
Veolia
Beth started her 22 year career in HR as an apprentice, since that time she has worked for a variety of organisations including 5 years leading HR teams at the Police through significant transformation. Beth joined Veolia 6 years ago as Head of Employee Relations, where she set up the ER team and created a progressive ER strategy aligned to the business strategy and people priorities. Beth was also a co-creator of Veolia’s Respect at Work programme and led the submission for the Princess Royal Training Awards.
Beth was appointed as Chief Human Resources Officer of Veolia UK and Ireland in September 2019. In this role, Beth has redesigned the HR function to bring closer alignment within the team and the wider business. She is passionate about the role and impact of HR in the business and has created and implemented a four year HR strategy which recognises that it is through our people that we will deliver business performance and achieve Impact 2023. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Beth has led a dynamic and ongoing response to people related matters for both the UK and Ireland with the focus at all times on all of Veolia’s people.
In the last year Beth has been raising the profile of Veolia to connect with prospective employees through its purpose led vision in high profile media such as BBC Breakfast, Sky News and i News.
As a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and a qualified Executive Coach and Mentor, Beth demonstrates the importance of continual learning and developing her team for success.
Beth lives in her Cheshire hometown with her partner and border terrier, Bobby. She has been a Manchester City season ticket holder since she was 5 years old and enjoys all things interior design.
Beth Whittaker will talk about Veolia’s journey to become purpose led. She will explain the role purpose plays within HR strategy and how it drives retention, engagement, and employee experience. Beth will share insights on:
EVP Talent Acquisition & Co-Lead Future Lab
Deutsche Bahn
Description tba
Innovation is a key enabler for Deutsche Bahn’s talent acquisition activities to recruit over 20.000 new employees per year in a challenging labour market. Kerstin Wagner heads the 800 people strong talent acquisition team at Deutsche Bahn. She will explain what makes their approach distinctive and strategically important. Their customer is the candidate in the labour market. Thus, Deutsche Bahn shapes the whole candidate journey with digital tools, data and innovative methods. This helps to positively increase the image as employer exponentially, to hire a volume of a mid sized city on time and underlines their goal: to become the earth’s most candidate-centric company. In addition, Kerstin takes a look into the crystal ball and shares how Deutsche Bahn, free of organizational boundaries, predicts the jobs of the future. She concludes by showing how her leadership principles, unique formats and a modern training environment foster innovation in her team.
Member of the Board of Management People and Transformation
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles
Astrid Fontaine will talk about the transformation in the automotive industry, especially the transformation at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. She will provide insights into the key success factors of transformation and the role of HR as a driver of change.
Engineering Skills & Learning Director
Thales
Because workplace is where we spend most of our lifetime, it is crucial to live the best experience ever.
I’ve spent all my professional life to hack my jobs and my companies with one single objective: be myself and do things I am motivated for. After more than 15 years in aeronautics engineering, I’ve always consider my workplace as a giant playground for experimentations, accomplishing as many things as designing products (including serious games) , organizing startup weekends, innovation challenges and even creating internal start-ups.
Recognized innovator and free spirit at THALES, I’m always searching how to solve problems inside and outside my organization.
As a Change Leader, I’m now mobilizing all my energy towards people so that they are able to be themselves and maximize their impact, individually and collectively. As a Neuro Linguistic Programming practitioner, I combine my creative spirit with my passion for human relationships in a daily basis to propose a journey that perfectly matches my own personality: “Fun but Serious”
Sebastien Lys will talk about how Thales builds skills & competences, and a culture of continuous learning. He will share the approach taken to create time, resources, and support for skill development as well as discuss how the project drives employee engagement. Sebastien will share insights on:
Chief Technology Officer
Siemens Healthineers
Peter Schardt has been Chief Technology Officer of Siemens Healthineers since October 01, 2018.
The doctor of physics joined Siemens in 1995 as a project manager for X-ray tubes. There he developed high-performance tubes for computed tomography before taking over the management of the entire predevelopment for X-ray tubes in 2002. In 2009, Peter assumed business responsibility for the Mechatronics Competence Center in Kemnath. This is one of the largest integrated development and manufacturing sites of Siemens Healthineers worldwide.
In 2011, he moved to the Laboratory Diagnostics business unit as program manager for the Atellica Solution product family. In this role, he played a key role in the final development and market launch of the new system, which is a trend-setter in laboratory diagnostics. On January 1,2018, Peter took over worldwide management of the X-ray Technology product division.
Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.
Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:
Senior Lecturer
MIT Sloan School of Management
David Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Formerly, as a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School, Robertson taught Innovation and Product Development in the undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs. From 2002 through 2010, Robertson was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at Switzerland’s Institute for Management Development (IMD), which received the #1 worldwide ranking by The Financial Times for its executive education programs. At IMD, he was Program Director for IMD’s largest program, the Program for Executive Development, and co-Director of the Making Business Sense of IT program, a joint program between IMD and MIT Sloan.
Understanding the cultures of the communities you’re serving is critical for effective innovation. David Robertson will talk about how organizations can learn from Cherokee culture to develop empathy dor their customers. He will share insights on:
David Robertson will lead a lab on different ways to use empathy for innovation. He will briefly introduce the platinum rule of innovation and illustrate how the Cherokee’s 12 languages of empathy can serve to provide some new ways to empathize with customers. This will be followed by a card game within the groups. Lab participants will learn and work on the following:
Chief Commercial Officer for Group Technology
BP
Dr Steve Cook completed a D.Phil. in Bio-organic chemistry at Jesus College, Oxford before joining BP in 1998. He managed various R&D projects in support of BP’s Acetyls and Olefins businesses (mainly in the areas of hetero- and homogeneous catalysis) before moving into a strategy role in BP’s Downstream business. This strategy work led to the creation of BP’s strategic accounts organisation, initially focused on deepening strategic relationships with global automotive companies.
Steve then moved into BP’s Renewables business in 2002, managing collaborative demonstration projects in the area of hydrogen refuelling for fuel cell vehicles which included the construction and operation of the UK’s first hydrogen refuelling station in London. During 2005 Steve was part of the launch team for BP’s Alternative Energy Business and following launch led various commercial business development activity in the gas to power business, originating major projects in the UK and Russia.
In 2009 Steve moved to the Group Technology organisation in BP, leading long term strategy development and change management.
From 2012 Steve led the Technology commercialisation team which was established to maximise the value of BP’s technology through the application of appropriate commercial models to technology programmes. Steve was VP Technology Commercialisation and part of BP’s Upstream Technology leadership team.
Steve is currently Chief Commercial Officer for Group Technology with a remit that includes long term technology strategy, emerging and disruptive technology, technology intelligence and technology commercialisation and business building through BP’s new scale up capability: Launchpad. All in service of creating the energy system of the future.
Energy is fundamental to human progress and the challenge is to provide this to more people while also helping the world move to a net zero carbon future. BP has a 100 year incumbency in hydrocarbon energy. In February we announced a new ambition to move the company and help the world get to net zero carbon by mid-century or sooner. This will require BP to develop new global businesses outside of oil and gas. This talk will share some of the successes and failures in BP’s use of venturing and business building in its new Launchpad subsidiary as we have begun to build an ‘ambidextrous’ organisation, able to grow its existing businesses while at the same time entrepreneurially building disruptive new businesses for the future.
Cordell Hardy will talk about how 3M is strengthening its culture with clarity of purpose. He will discuss how the organization incorporates purpose from product portfolio to sustainability. Cordell will share insights on:
SVP Digital Customer Solutions / ABB Turbocharging
ABB
Cristian Corotto is the global Head of Digital Customer Solutions at Turbo Systems Switzerland Ltd. where he leads an international cross-functional team in developing and implementing innovative business models, platforms and digital solutions.
Formerly VP Online Customer Experience at Nobel Biocare and Head of Buyer Relationship Marketing Europe for eBay Inc. he has extensive experience in digital innovation, strategic marketing, business development, change management and process optimization and has consistently driven the translation of data into value for both business and end customers.
He holds a Master’s degrees in both Marketing Management (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy) and in Management Engineering (Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy) and gained his experiences at Pirelli, Fiat Group Automobiles (now Stellantis), Case New Holland and Iveco. In addition, Cristian also completed the Stanford Graduate School of Business executive program.
Cristian Corotto has taken the digital approach and mindset from his work at eBay first to a dental implant company then to ABB. He will discuss the ABB’s four-years long digital transformation journey and share learnings on:
Executive Vice President Finance Customer Services
Siemens Healthineers
Judit has more than 20 years’ experience in innovating, re-thinking and implementing finance of the future. She worked in multiple roles, countries and industries cross Siemens (like Digital Industry and Healthcare). Her often unconventional approaches created new ways of enabling tangible profit improvements and sustainable growth. Trying to do the same at less cost was never enough for her – as certified agile leader empowerment and agility are her enablers for successful innovations and digitalization.
She is an energetic and self-motivated team player and lifts traditional line management models to the next level of inspiring leadership. Therefore she loves to build, motivate and deeply engage in cross-functional and international teams fostering collaboration and thriving to improve things end-to-end. Being a powerful digital guardian, she combines the use of data to drive value based on unconventional ideas and new business models. As Customer Service CFO, Healthineers biggest horizontal, and as sponsor of the T-Club, she is a role model in level less thinking, enabling a culture of trust and an environment that nurtures our endeavor to the next big things in Healthcare.
Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.
Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:
Director of Customer Innovation
Porsche Digital
Florian has spent over 15 years in the mobility industry, starting by building up a Competence Center at Fraunhofer IAO for Mobility and Smart City Design with more than 120 employees. During this time, he was the Director and established a joint lab with MIT called Ambient Mobility. The focus was on exploring how converging trends such as electrification and sharing could be used to re-design the mobility solutions in our cities.
For the last 7 years, Florian has been at Porsche AG – and as Manager, helped create the VW Garage Mobility Lab with a first investment in the area of mobility and parking. Currently, he is the Director for Customer Innovation/Digital Business and is working with various start-ups related to mobility services, cycling and Web3. Florian studied Business Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe.
Porsche Digital was founded with the goal of helping Porsche digitalize the core and open up new business opportunities. Florian Rothfuss has been leading innovation projects for new business areas since the unit’s inception. He will discuss how Porsche Digital builds new digital businesses and interacts with the mothership. Key learnings on building digital businesses:
Manager Special Projects
Ericsson
Hendrik Esser works as manager special projects at Ericsson. He is continuously exploring and driving new ways to create better results and greater organizations. He has more than 20 years of leadership experience in product development ranging from project- and project office management and technology management to being the COO of a large product development organization. On that journey he has led small (20 people) to very large (>7000 people), globally distributed organizations. Starting with the agile transformation of one of Ericsson’s Software development units in 2008, Hendrik has become one of the drivers of Ericsson’s enterprise transition. Today he works as in-house consultant driving the business agility transformation of one of Ericsson’s business areas with over 15000 people. With his passion to drive transformations, creating organizations that enable companies coping with the complexity of todays business world, Hendrik is also an internationally active change driver and ambassador. He participates in several cross-industry exchange groups, collaborates with research projects, voluntarily works as program director for the Agile Alliance’s Supporting Agile Adoption initiative and is a frequent speaker at international Agile-, Project management- and HR conferences as well as company events.
As part of its shift away from manufacturing consumer electronics to developing software solutions around its core strength in network infrastructure, Ericsson embarked in 2008 on a transformation effort that prioritized agile to help reorient the entire organization. Through his experiences at Ericsson, Hendrik Esser draws on the essential aspects of the organizational transformation to discuss how to leverage business agility for growth innovation.
Ericsson embarked in 2008 on a transformation effort that prioritized agile to help reorient the entire organization. Through his experiences at Ericsson, Hendrik Esser will talk about how to drive mindset change to create an adaptive organization and present some of the key lessons learned:
Agile Coach - Digitalization of R&D
BASF
Cordelia Krooß is an Agile Coach at BASF. She is responsible for Agile Transformation in Digitalization of R&D. A biologist by education, she sets up agile experiments and enables teams and executives to apply agile principles in an R&D context.
Cordelia is an acknowledged expert on Digital Transformation, with a strong background in coaching, organizational development, change management, learning and communications. In her 28 years with BASF, she has built a track record of sustainable successes. She was part of the team behind connect.BASF, one of the first Online Business Networks established in the German industry. When leading the Change Management workstream for BASF’s introduction of Office365, Cordelia established a consulting team for “New Ways of Working” that still operates today. Prior to this, she worked in various communication roles in Germany and Hong Kong.
The Lab will explore the frictions between the theory behind agile and the real world of R&D. Participants will discuss challenges in adopting agile in R&D, examine different aspects of the resulting frictions, and harvest insights and learnings.
Principal Key Expert and Founder of T-Club
Siemens Healthineers
Marc Schlichtner has 21 years’ experience in innovations, portfolio management, project- & regional management and sales. As Portfolio Manager in he is driving the global digital health service portfolio and platform and ecosystem related ativities for Siemens Healthineers.
He is founder of the Transformation Club (T-Club). The T-Club is a Siemens Healthineers grass-root initiative, focusing on the cross-company transformation. In recent years, he has implemented many trendsetting future topics. All had a strong transformational character and ran in various businesses across Siemens. During his career he gathered multiyear experience in digital services, servitization, design thinking, digital business model design, customer centric innovation, digital transformation, loT and platform-based ecosystems, cross industries. He was part of incubation of internal lean startups. This 360-degree view provides him with all levers for a successful digital transformation.
As recognized thought leader in his domain he is member of Research Advisory Board of FIR at RWTH Aachen University, Advisory Board (DiHECO) Kaunas University of Technology & University of California Berkeley and the Advisory Board “MBA Leadership Digital Business Transformation” at the Quadriga University of Applied Sciences.
Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.
Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:
Professor of Innovation and REF Director
University of Bath
Ammon Salter is a Professor of Innovation and REF Director at the School of Management, University of Bath. He received his doctorate from SPRU at the University of Sussex in 1999, where he also worked as a researcher from 1998-2002. From 2003-2013, he was a faculty member at Imperial College London, acting as the co-Director of the Innovation Studies Centre. From 2009-2013, he was the Research Director of the UK Innovation Research Centre, which was collaboration between Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge. His research has been published widely, in journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change and California Management Review. His current research focuses on open and distributed models of innovation, social networks and innovation, and university-industry collaboration and typically involves engagement with policy and practice through collaborative projects with industrial and governmental partners.
Ammon Salter will lead a Lab on managing technologists. He will start off the Lab with a brief introduction to the main tensions in motivating and developing R&D staff as well as the trade-offs in resolving them. This will be followed by group discussions.
The Lab participants will learn and discuss the following:
More to be announced
Director Product Mgmt, Microsoft Research & AI, CoFounder Cortana
Microsoft
Ed is a principal product manager for Microsoft Research where he leads teams developing new products. He started out as a scientist, trained as a researcher, and ultimately fell in love with applying those skills to creating new products and businesses. Ed joined MSR from the Cortana team where he co-founded the product, lead product planning, and lead some targeted AI innovation and ecosystem projects. Prior to Microsoft, Ed lead insight strategy teams for Yahoo!, helping build new products and better businesses across search, browse, rich media, and ecommerce. And even before that, Ed lead market research, user research, business intelligence, and management consulting teams focused on applying research to make the organization smarter and better. Ed holds a Ph.D. and a deep love of coffee.
Our market landscape is changing, our customer’s expectations evolving, and new partners or competitors are springing up faster than ever. Internal innovation isn’t antithetical to global businesses, it is a core necessity. So, what is it really like to be an intrapreneur and what can we learn from other intrapreneurs to help us deliver in this new world? Ed Doran will share real world examples and lessons of moving from new discovery to new products and businesses to help you on this journey.
Senior Vice President, Corporate Research & Development
P&G
Lee Ellen Drechsler’s career at Procter & Gamble has included technical leadership roles across Beauty Care, Baby Care and Corporate R&D, with responsibilities from upstream Disruptive Innovation to downstream Product Supply. Lee Ellen leads Corporate Transformative Platform Technology (TPT), Global Packaging, Process and Open Innovation Disciplines, and Glad JV organizations with a mission to continue building P&G’s long-held reputation as a world leader of growth driven by innovation. She is accelerating the way P&G delivers game-changing and sustainable products, packages, and services, leveraging early in-market learning as well as collaborations with strong academic and business partners.
Lee Ellen Dreschler will talk about how P&G’s breakthrough innovation unit identifies and develops ideas and technologies to create new S-curves. She will explain how the unit has evolved to become multifunctional, and how its set-up and positioning allow it to work with and develop platform technologies. Lee Ellen will tell the story of the unit’s journey in developing new products from starting small through working with customers and pivoting, as well how it collaborates with startups.
Senior Lecturer
MIT Sloan School of Management
David Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Formerly, as a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School, Robertson taught Innovation and Product Development in the undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs. From 2002 through 2010, Robertson was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at Switzerland’s Institute for Management Development (IMD), which received the #1 worldwide ranking by The Financial Times for its executive education programs. At IMD, he was Program Director for IMD’s largest program, the Program for Executive Development, and co-Director of the Making Business Sense of IT program, a joint program between IMD and MIT Sloan.
Understanding the cultures of the communities you’re serving is critical for effective innovation. David Robertson will talk about how organizations can learn from Cherokee culture to develop empathy dor their customers. He will share insights on:
David Robertson will lead a lab on different ways to use empathy for innovation. He will briefly introduce the platinum rule of innovation and illustrate how the Cherokee’s 12 languages of empathy can serve to provide some new ways to empathize with customers. This will be followed by a card game within the groups. Lab participants will learn and work on the following:
Chief Commercial Officer for Group Technology
BP
Dr Steve Cook completed a D.Phil. in Bio-organic chemistry at Jesus College, Oxford before joining BP in 1998. He managed various R&D projects in support of BP’s Acetyls and Olefins businesses (mainly in the areas of hetero- and homogeneous catalysis) before moving into a strategy role in BP’s Downstream business. This strategy work led to the creation of BP’s strategic accounts organisation, initially focused on deepening strategic relationships with global automotive companies.
Steve then moved into BP’s Renewables business in 2002, managing collaborative demonstration projects in the area of hydrogen refuelling for fuel cell vehicles which included the construction and operation of the UK’s first hydrogen refuelling station in London. During 2005 Steve was part of the launch team for BP’s Alternative Energy Business and following launch led various commercial business development activity in the gas to power business, originating major projects in the UK and Russia.
In 2009 Steve moved to the Group Technology organisation in BP, leading long term strategy development and change management.
From 2012 Steve led the Technology commercialisation team which was established to maximise the value of BP’s technology through the application of appropriate commercial models to technology programmes. Steve was VP Technology Commercialisation and part of BP’s Upstream Technology leadership team.
Steve is currently Chief Commercial Officer for Group Technology with a remit that includes long term technology strategy, emerging and disruptive technology, technology intelligence and technology commercialisation and business building through BP’s new scale up capability: Launchpad. All in service of creating the energy system of the future.
Energy is fundamental to human progress and the challenge is to provide this to more people while also helping the world move to a net zero carbon future. BP has a 100 year incumbency in hydrocarbon energy. In February we announced a new ambition to move the company and help the world get to net zero carbon by mid-century or sooner. This will require BP to develop new global businesses outside of oil and gas. This talk will share some of the successes and failures in BP’s use of venturing and business building in its new Launchpad subsidiary as we have begun to build an ‘ambidextrous’ organisation, able to grow its existing businesses while at the same time entrepreneurially building disruptive new businesses for the future.
Group Chief Design Officer, Design Center Founder
Thales
Didier Boulet is the THALES Design Center Director, an organization he co-founded in 2013. Its mission is to leverage Design-driven Innovation or Design Thinking throughout THALES. The Design Center Network is currently present in 9 locations across the world. Didier is also leading the digital transformation plan related to User Experience Design (UX). Since joining Thales Didier has held a number of high-level positions in Business, Innovation and Design. He is also serving on a number of Innovation & Governance Boards including THALES Learning Hub, Design Center Network, Digital Marketing & THALES Belgium Board. Didier is an innovation activist and “serial intrapreneur”, having founded and co-created multiple innovation platforms and initiatives. He is a Belgian national and a graduate of the Haute Ecole de Bruxelles.
Thales has been on a Design Thinking journey for more than 10 years, implementing in the process a strong design (thinking) center network (15+ DCs opened across the world). More recently, Thales Digital Transformation has opened a new design workstream focusing on User Experience Design creating a unique context for the creation of a design organization/capabilities.
In this talk, Didier will present synthetic elements of this journey and the more recent convergence towards Thales Design which brings together design thinking, UX/UI, product/service design & industrial design. Didier will present some of the lessons learned and key pivots along the way.
Cordell Hardy will talk about how 3M is strengthening its culture with clarity of purpose. He will discuss how the organization incorporates purpose from product portfolio to sustainability. Cordell will share insights on:
SVP Digital Customer Solutions / ABB Turbocharging
ABB
Cristian Corotto is the global Head of Digital Customer Solutions at Turbo Systems Switzerland Ltd. where he leads an international cross-functional team in developing and implementing innovative business models, platforms and digital solutions.
Formerly VP Online Customer Experience at Nobel Biocare and Head of Buyer Relationship Marketing Europe for eBay Inc. he has extensive experience in digital innovation, strategic marketing, business development, change management and process optimization and has consistently driven the translation of data into value for both business and end customers.
He holds a Master’s degrees in both Marketing Management (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy) and in Management Engineering (Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy) and gained his experiences at Pirelli, Fiat Group Automobiles (now Stellantis), Case New Holland and Iveco. In addition, Cristian also completed the Stanford Graduate School of Business executive program.
Cristian Corotto has taken the digital approach and mindset from his work at eBay first to a dental implant company then to ABB. He will discuss the ABB’s four-years long digital transformation journey and share learnings on:
VP, Head of Venture Building and Strategy, Stationary Solid Oxide Fuel Cells
Bosch
Sebastian Budischin has been VP for venture building and business model design as well as strategy development, market intelligence and product management for stationary fuel cells at Bosch since 2021.
Before that, he was Director in the Corporate Department for Business Model Innovation at Robert Bosch GmbH from June 2016 until end of 2020. He was responsible for the Accelerator Programs, the Business Model Academy Asia-Pacific as well as consulting activities for Industry 4.0. Before joining the department for Business Model Innovation, he was the head of marketing, business strategy and communication for Asia-Pacific for the electrical drive business.
In previous positions, he was working in the fields of marketing and strategy development in the automotive and power tool business. He studied international business in Stuttgart, GER and Michigan, USA.
Sebastian Budischin will talk about Bosch’s approach to growing an internal scale-up within a corporate environment. He will discuss the approach taken to maintaining the right degree of flexibility and independence for the venture as well as the strategy for collaborating with partners to accelerate growth. He will share challenges and best practices on:
Director, R&D External Innovation Technology Scout
PepsiCo
Kelly Van Dyke is a Director within the External innovation team for PepsiCo’s Global R&D organization. Kelly has 20 years of experience in the Food Industry, earning her BSc from Purdue University. She currently has accountability for identifying & driving technologies that will disrupt the Wellness & Health CPG category through strategic partnerships and business opportunities. Prior to this role, she led multiple highly successful Product Development teams delivering new innovations to multiple Global markets at PepsiCo and Kraft Foods, previously.
Kelly Van Dyke will talk about how PepsiCo collaborates with startups. She will introduce the organization’s tripartite collaboration strategy and will delve deeper into partnerships within R&D workstreams. Kelly will share insights on:
Managing Director, New Business
BASF
Since January 1, 2016 Volker Hammes is Managing Director of BASF New Business GmbH, Ludwigshafen/Germany. He is particularly responsible for Business Build-up of innovative material solutions e.g. for E-Power Management, Functional Feed Additives, and 3D-Printing (Additive Manufacturing). Additionally, he is Chairman of BASF 3D Printing Solutions GmbH, Heidelberg/Germany.
Currently, Volker Hammes serves on the Boards of Essentium Inc, Pflugerville/TX, USA, Evolve Additive Solutions, Minnetonka/MN, USA, and the NASDAQ listed company Materialise NV, Leuven/Belgium.
Born on July 21, 1963 in Essen, he is married with two children. Volker Hammes holds a Master of Science degree with first-class honors in Mechanical Engineering/Plastics Technology from RWTH Aachen University.
In this fireside chat, Volker Hammes and Axel Rosenø, CEO of Innovation Roundtable, discuss new business creation at BASF. They discuss how BASF is organized for new business creation and delve into lessons learned on building new businesses, managing challenges, and scaling. They further discuss why organizations should not go it alone and how to co-innovate with startups.
VP Head of Open Innovation
Signify
Study of chemistry in Germany, followed by a postdoc at Caltech. In 1995, joined Philips Research to work on LED materials. In 2004, transferred to Philips Lighting to continue with LED system development. In 2006, joined newly founded LED business group as CTO to develop LED lamps and systems for the emerging LED Lighting market. In 2011, continued to work on LED platforms with a build-up of a new supply base in Asia. Since 2013, working in Open Innovation to focus on the emerging digital Lighting market with Lighting being one of the most interesting verticals in IoT.
Abstract tba
Thomas Canova will talk about how Solvay develops and incubates new platform-based businesses. He will discuss how the organization identifies new opportunities, manages uncertainty, and collaborates with startups to develop and incubate new businesses. Thomas will share learnings on: