Driving Innovation Culture: How Leaders Can Empower Teams and Enable Experimentation

In this fireside chat, Nici Bush (Chief Innovation, Science and Technology Officer at Mars) and Axel Rosenø (CEO of Innovation Roundtable), discuss what leaders can do drive innovation culture. They talk about Nici’s work with R&D and innovation teams to build psychological safety and drive experimentation. They further discuss how leaders are moving away from asking for safe solutions and touch on the organization’s approach to leveraging AI for consumer engagement.

The Key Pillars to Leveraging AI for Measurable Impact

Marc O’Regan will talk about how Dell Technologies defined the key pillars to creating value with AI. He will discuss how to build AI solutions to create measurable impact. Marc will share learnings on:

• Tapping into opportunities and minding the risks in leveraging AI solutions so as to create a positive impact
  
• Creating value with AI – from understanding what AI can do to defining what makes the organization stand out and how AI can accelerate that differentiation
  
• Analyzing over 1500 AI projects to define 5 pillars and principles for any given AI project – enabling focus, roadmap comparison, and alleviating pressure
  
• Leveraging learnings to build a customer facing engine to scale AI solutions

Evolving Design: Building a Deep User Understanding, Leveraging AI, and Preserving Nuance

Michele Cadamuro will draw on his 25 years of experience in design to share insights on the evolving role of design. He will discuss how design can lead to a deep understanding of humans as well as the role of design in the AI world. Michele will share learnings on:

• The evolution of design and UX with the changing user-product interaction
• Evolving design to leverage AI capabilities – and why it is essential to understand the work in order to identify the right areas for using AI to support and augment
• Using AI to synthetize insights and create variations for inspirations – and the key role of designers in understanding nuances and reading between the lines
• Tapping into brain science insights to enhance understanding of humans – and orchestrating different values across different personas and stakeholders
• Key takeaways including the need to think beyond process outputs, create a diverse environment for human centricity, and more

Putting Sustainability at the Forefront – Organizing for Sustainability, Piloting Solutions, and Engaging the Ecosystem

Andrea Debbane will talk about Jaguar Land Rover’s approach to bringing sustainability to the forefront. She will discuss how the organization embeds sustainability across departments and collaborates with suppliers and startups to innovate for sustainability. Andrea will share insights on:

• Defining the vision and culture – and embedding sustainability into the culture as a value for the organization
  
• Setting up a dedicated sustainability office – building capabilities and integrating sustainability into the strategy, operation, and culture across chapters
  
• Innovating for sustainability within the motorsports team to enable agility, speed – and homing in on the time to go to market to ensure adoption
  
• Partnering with the ecosystem and the supply chain – thinking outside of the sector and working with startups on new materials and solutions

Building and Scaling New Customer-Centric Offerings: Identifying White Spaces and Collaborating Across the Value Chain

Leveraging AI for Enterprise Resilience – The Framework and Use Cases for Creating Value

Ambica Rajagopal will talk about Michelin’s approach to leveraging AI at the enterprise level. She will discuss the framework on how to think about AI, explain where value from AI comes, and illustrate the approach with use cases. Ambica will share learnings on:

• AI as a resilience lever – understanding and modeling risks, powering innovation, and foreseeing and handling risks
  
• Building resilience with AI – combining top-down strategy with bottom-up empowerment, building the data layer, defining the strategy, and more
  
• Illustrating approaches with examples – having many use cases in production including transforming forecasting with AI, using AI for innovation, and more
  
• Where to focus on with agentic AI – why and how to prioritize strategic agents for restructuring the business process and rethinking the value chain

Managing R&D and Culture: Restructuring R&D During Turbulent Times to be More Agile and Closer to End-Markets

Christian Eilbracht will talk about Evonik’s approach to transforming R&D to enhance innovation capabilities and move from corporate to businesses and get even closer to customers and end-markets. He will discuss how the organization is transforming R&D to strengthen innovation culture and drive agility. Christian will share insights on:

• Restructuring R&D to become ever faster and more agile – and managing the cultural differences between corporate R&D and business R&D
• Creating a clear strategy – and getting people to understand the rationale to drive change forward
• Balancing short-term with long-term strategic growth initiatives – and extracting insights from past initiatives to inform the approach and enhance success
• Bolstering the culture of innovation and high-performance – and leveraging the inherent motivation in getting R&D close to customers

Innovating for Sustainability – Exploring Sustainable Solutions Across Areas to Create Tangible Impact

Circular Economy: Shifting Paradigms and Mindset

Christine Maria Betz leads sustainability at BSH Home Appliances Group. Christine will share insights and challenges on:
• Setting up the organization for circularity
• Achieving first successes on the circular journey
• Collaborating with the ecosystem

Design for All Humanity in the Context of AI Driven Change

Leveraging Agentic AI for Innovation and Business Model Transformation

Innovating for Sustainable Power

Building a Full-Fledged Design System: Embedding Design into Product Development, Defining KPIs and OKRs, and Showcasing Value

Didier Boulet will talk about the fifteen-years long journey of building a full-fledged design organization at Thales. He will discuss how design became a strategic pillar to driving user-centric and design-driven innovation. Didier will share learnings on:

• Starting the journey with the first design center – and the journey of moving from tactical design to a full-fledged design system with design being a part of the strategy
• Building a design system with a consistent signature – organizing design assets and demonstrating the value for the business to the company
• Integrating design into the engineering process – and creating KPIs and enterprise-wide OKRs to measure progress and incentivize management
• Showing and not telling what design brings to the table – building a portfolio of redesigned products to showcase impact
• Key takeaways including the need for persistence and patience, and more

Building a Service-Based Business Model in a Product-Driven Company: Changing Mindsets and Collaborating with Customers

Learnings on Designing for Human Centricity – Redefining Design with Advanced AI and Asking the Right Questions

Federico Casalegno will draw on his extensive experience to share lessons learned on human-centric design. And he will discuss how Samsung is adapting processes and evolving the designer’s role to catalyze human-centric innovation with AI. Federico will share learnings on:

• Leveraging human-centric design – the evolution of design and lessons learned on what works and what doesn’t
  
• Using AI in design and the changing role of designers – adapting the process to a fast-paced iterative approach, asking the right questions, and more
  
• What is needed to design for end-users – and how the roles and competencies need to be redefined to drive new ways of working
  
• Leveraging AI and advanced computing for product innovation – creating products that better fit customer aspirations

How to Win with Startups and Internal Ventures: Strategy, Governance and Metrics to Scale Impact

Drawing on experience from Airbus Group, Greg Ombach will discuss how to use startup collaboration as a competitive advantage and internal ventures to deliver deployed solutions with measurable value. He will outline the governance that removes friction in a global corporate, the metrics that track learning, pilot to scale conversion and value realization, and how data helps internal support functions become accelerators rather than bottlenecks.

The Circular Framework – Reducing Emissions, Defining KPIs and Partnering

Anke Hampel will talk about ABB’s approach to circularity. She will share the organization’s circular framework and discuss the key pillars to delivering on circular targets. Anke will share insights on:

• The circularity framework – working through the product portfolio and running LCAs
• Defining 8 areas from sourcing through design to recycling – and assigning dedicated KPIs defined by businesses
• Partnering externally to automate circularity assessment
• Organizing for circularity – having a small team with distributed responsibilities and working with the businesses

Transforming Towards a Focused Tech Company – Driving Agility and Enabling Skill-Based Collaboration

Tim Holzapfel will talk about how Siemens transformed the organization from a conglomerate to a focused tech company by embedding collaboration and agility. He will discuss how the role of the HQ changed, how a digital transformation tool enabled collaboration and the change ways of working and how digitalization & data driven organization enables AI use cases. Tim will share insights on:

• The transformation of a conglomerate into a focused tech company and how the role of the HQ changes
  
• Overall how the organization of work is changing after a century of Taylorism and working in hierarchies
  towards collaboration, project work and agility on all levels
  
• How a Collaboration View in addition to a classical orgchart supports the transformation of how work is
  being organized and made visible
  
• What importance digitalization, a data driven focus, and AI/GenAI use cases enable the matching of
  employees & managers as well as skills & domain expertise required in agile organizations

Leveraging AI Agents: Taking an Investment-Driven Approach, Measuring Benefits, and Enabling Different Use Cases

Carsten Amann will present how Bosch’s Mobility Aftermarket division is taking an investment-rationale-driven approach to deploying a global AI agent platform that delivers measurable benefits.He will share insights on:

• Applying a clear investment rationale to AI to create sustainable, long-term value for the business
  
• Deploying MArK, Mobility Aftermarket reliable K(c)olleague, an AI-driven platform designed to optimize and automate business processes
  
• Greatness in small steps: how MArK enables scalable impact by combining standardized AI agents from a repository to support a wide range of use cases
  
• Making investment rationale actionable: MArK systematically tracks cost savings, productivity gains, and complexity reduction, and feeds these into a central efficiency hub for transparent accounting

Leadership in an AI-World – Redefining Approach and Navigating Challenges

Manuel Dietz will talk about the impact of AI on leadership. He will discuss findings from interviews with CTOs and CIO and will reflect on leadership and organization in the era of AI. Manuel will share learnings on:

• The impact of AI on leadership – supporting the C-level with strategy, and helping mid-level leaders become more effective and achieve more
• Amplifying effects of AI – how AI amplifies the things done right, but also laziness and chaos
• Uncovering the real bottlenecks with AI – and the need to have a clear objective, intent, and expected outcome for development projects
  
• How AI will impact collaboration and organizational design – and how leaders can use it to become more effective with fewer people

Bridge Builders for Breakthrough Innovation – Where Disciplines Collide, Breakthroughs Begin

The organizations that win will not be those with the best ideas, but those that can connect and scale them across boundaries. Betsabeh Madani Hermann used a VC-inspired model to unlock breakthrough innovation within a large organization with great success. Today, that model is being reshaped by AI, accelerating innovation cycles and forcing disciplines to converge.

Breakthroughs no longer fail due to lack of ideas, but in the gaps between domains. In this keynote, Betsabeh explores the shift from building ventures to building convergent systems, and introduces the “bridge builder” as a critical role to connect clinical, technological, and data expertise. Drawing on Philips’ experience, she will highlight how to strengthen milestone-driven models with learning velocity, and ringfencing while facilitating intelligent permeability between core and exploratory innovation.

Reducing Scope 3 Emissions: Moving at Speed through Deep Suppliers Collaboration

Christophe Quiquempoix will talk about Schneider Electric’s framework to achieving sustainability in procurement. He will discuss how the organization structures programs in 5-year cycles and will detail the organization’s journey to aggressively reduce Scope 3 emissions from top suppliers. Christophe will share insights on:

• Sustainable procurement framework – running foundational, compliance, and transformational programs (addressing E, S & G) in a structured approach integrating sustainability KPIs, and creating incentives
• The Zero Carbon Project: the approach to halving operational carbon footprint for 1000 top suppliers in five years – taking a 12-step approach and favoring action and speed over perfection
• Creating an extensive support infrastructure to engage suppliers – assessing maturity, providing dedicated training, digital tools, customized support and decarbonization levers, and more
  
• Meeting suppliers where they are to address regional differences – and addressing data quality challenges in a way that prioritizes speed and action
  
• Key takeways and steps ahead

Driving Action through Partnerships and Innovation towards NetZero

Simon Boas Hoffmeyer will talk about how Carlsberg Group has executed its sustainability programme over many years, and among others achieved more than 60% emissions reduction at their breweries since 2015 and driven absolute reductions in the full value chain despite growth in the recent years. He will further reflect on how the brewer continues to pioneer low-carbon solutions to achieve a net ZERO value chain by 2040. Carlsberg’s practical approach to sustainability-driven innovation:

• Make sustainability interesting for consumers, even if they initially will not pay extra
• Treating sustainable innovation as any other project and using traditional innovation process
• Identifying the most important hot spots to drive down carbon emissions
• Measuring and managing scope 3 emissions using primary data

Lessons Learned on Collaborating with Startups: Leveraging a Dedicated Hub and Building Long-Term Relationships

Hemdat Sagi will talk about how Volkswagen Groups Innovation Hub collaborates with startups. She will detail key learnings in making collaboration a success, including:

• Connecting startups with the company to do PoCs – understanding the company’s needs and involving the organization from the start
  
• Sharing successful PoCs internally – and inspiring other units to think about use cases
  
• Building long-term relationships with startups – following up on startups to check if they have new solutions or have matured
  
• A case of startup collaboration illustrating the approach and the pivot made

Building New Ventures in a Large Firm – and the Key Role of Culture, Digital Transformation, and Agility

Mayank Mohun will talk about Siemens Healthineers’ approach to building new ventures. He will use examples of new ventures to illustrate learnings on how to build new businesses within a large company and overcome speed bumps on the way. Mayank will share insights on:

• Selling the new venture proposal to the board – building the business case, minding the devil in the little details, and understanding restrictions the core business poses to new venture ambitions
  
• Starting with a pilot and core team to validate the solutions with customers – and building bridges across the organization
  
• Convincing people to think differently, strategically, and in a lean manner – and working in nimble and agile ways
  
• Executing and showing early success – handholding sales and supporting functions and maintaining agility in letter and spirit
  
• Flipping the project into a business – and being cognizant of costs

From Zero to One: Building New Ventures and Leading Innovation Teams in a Large Company

Susana Bernal will talk about how to build new ventures in a multinational. She will discuss how to move past the challenges and barriers of building new ventures in a large corporation. Susana will also discuss how leaders can show up for their innovation teams and protect them from mature business processes. She will share learnings on:

• How to set up – starting small, setting up a small team, protecting them and letting them achieve traction before exposing them to the organization
  
• Getting the corporate to treat the new ventures as an investment – the critical role of vision for new ventures instead of a tactical approach that fits a mature business
  
• Casting the team and getting them obsessed with a customer problem – why more money and headcount aren’t the keys to speed and success, and what works instead
  
• Leading an innovation team and managing the burden of double-sidedness – shielding the way in which innovation needs to happen and creating different incentives, ways of working, and behaviors for the team
  
• Attracting smart rebels – convincing them to join the team and creating a way forward for entrepreneurial people

AI-Augmented Innovation — From Concept to Consumer Insight in Minutes

Paulo Oliveira will lead a hands-on exercise where participants experience a complete AI-augmented innovation workflow on their own phones. In seven guided steps — from concept generation through virtual prototyping to a synthetic consumer interview — participants will experience how AI can compress the front end of innovation, turning what traditionally takes weeks (or even months!) into minutes. Along the way, Paulo will open up the hood: sharing the prompts, the workflow architecture, and answering questions in real time. No technical skills required.

Inclusive Innovation – Solving Real Customer Problems in a Scalable Way

What happens when we write “Innovation Department” on a door. Do we encourage the rest of the organization to innovate or to stand back? Bilgi Karan will talk about successes and failures in creating an inclusive innovation culture. He will share lessons lear”What happens when we write “Innovation Department” on a door. Do we encourage the rest of the organization to innovate or to stand back? Bilgi Karan will talk about successes and failures in creating an inclusive innovation culture. He will share lessons learned on:

• Focusing on smaller, high leverage initiatives that solve big problems in a scalable way – and the impact of solving boring problems
  
• Power of an innovation network – prioritizing learning, ensuring visibility and top leadership sponsorship, coaching people, and more
  
• Inclusive innovation both for innovators and customers by eliminating idea ownership
  
• Prioritizing user outcomes over business outcomes with the power of UX – and the impact of AI
  
• Knowing how to fail – celebrating failures before, during, and after a project
  

Design Thinking Crash Course – Launching Design Thinking In Your Organization & Effectively Training Mindsets

Camilla Damgaard-Soerensen will lead a design thinking crash course where participants will experience and learn the method as well as get a taste for the most important design thinking mindsets for their organization. Camilla will also discuss how to get started with design thinking in your organization tomorrow.

Navigating Complexity: Leadership and Decision Making in the Face of Ambiguity and Uncertainty

Taking a Fit-for-Purpose Approach – Enhancing Effectiveness through Contextual Awareness

Sometimes we wonder why our outcomes are not in line with what we were striving and hoping for. A strong contributor is that we might use ways of working that seem good in isolation, but do not fit the context of the challenge we are working on, and are therefore not the most effective ones. In this Lab participants will learn about, and apply, a framework that helps assess the context and derive effective ways of working from that, thereby increasing chances of success.

Customer Insights – The Roles of Marketers & Innovators in the age of data/AI, and the Need for Training & Sharing

Stefan Stremersch will lead on a lab on how to optimally use customer insights to supercharge the front-end of innovation. He will introduce some of the most powerful yet often overlooked methods to put voice of the customer in the innovation process. This will be followed by group discussion:

The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Examine how effective their organizations’ current methods are – and where to improve
  
• Understand how to drive intuition based on small data and leverage crowdsourcing to really learn about customer behavior and opportunities
• Learn how to activate Gen AI for needs discovery
  
• Leverage the ‘customer insights wheel’ to foster collabortaion and leverage intuition across areas including co-creation, imaging, and observing

An Inclusive View on Innovation Talent: Mobilizing and Developing People in the Age of AI

Stefan Stremersch will lead a lab on how to build innovation talent by aligning purpose, mobilizing the right people, and developing their proficiency. Drawing on the core Purpose-People-Proficiency framework of his new book The Talent Advantage (Kogan Page, Sep 2025), Stefan will share practical examples on how to drive innovation talent within organizations, and guide participants to:

• Identify the best and worst developed innovation competencies in their firm (knowledge, skills, and attitudes)
  
• Pinpoint critical gaps and explore why they persist despite existing efforts
  
• Discuss how to craft and activate a clear purpose to rally people around innovation talent
  
• Explore how to involve the right people – including leadership – and leverage AI in talent development
  
• Get inspired by practical tools to improve learning journeys and accelerate competency building
  

Participants walk away with a practical, peer-tested approach to strengthen innovation talent in their organization.

More tba

More to be announced

Strengthening Brands and Reputational Leadership in Complex Times and Environments: Key Lessons Learned

Lynette Jackson has extensive experience in shaping communications strategy, including at Siemens. She will talk about how she brings lessons learned from her previous role in brand building to The Adecco Group. Lynette will share insights on:

• Why brand and reputation matter in complex times – the role of brand and reputation in creating trust and clarity, and supporting stability and direction across markets
  
• Learnings on brand building across diverse markets with different political, regulatory, and cultural contexts – what worked, what didn’t, and how the approach evolved
  
• Implementing lessons learned – translating enterprise brand thinking into a people-driven organization, embedding purpose, strengthening trust, and more
  
• What worked and what was harder than expected – creating alignment, communicating in a clear and human way, maintaining consistency, and managing risks
  
• Key takeaways on the future of brand and reputational leadership including on the evolving role of brand leaders, the role of trust and transparency, and more

Evolving Design: Building a Deep User Understanding, Leveraging AI, and Preserving Nuance

Michele Cadamuro will draw on his 25 years of experience in design to share insights on the evolving role of design. He will discuss how design can lead to a deep understanding of humans as well as the role of design in the AI world. Michele will share learnings on:

• The evolution of design and UX with the changing user-product interaction
• Evolving design to leverage AI capabilities – and why it is essential to understand the work in order to identify the right areas for using AI to support and augment
• Using AI to synthetize insights and create variations for inspirations – and the key role of designers in understanding nuances and reading between the lines
• Tapping into brain science insights to enhance understanding of humans – and orchestrating different values across different personas and stakeholders
• Key takeaways including the need to think beyond process outputs, create a diverse environment for human centricity, and more

Leading a Large-Scale Transformation and Building a Brand Strategy: Creating a Roadmap and Engaging People

Friederike Von Krosigk will talk about driving transformation at GE. She will discuss what it takes to drive the transformation with a future-back approach and detail how a brand-agnostic organization has built six portfolio brands. Friederike will share learnings on:

• Driving the transformation – getting buy-in and creating a path for the transformation
• Working backwards from an ideal state – and showing people the vision and the concrete steps to achieving it to prevent overwhelm
• Building six brands – overcoming initial resistance and driving acceptance
• Positioning the brands – aligning on target audience and insights, bringing people along, and the go-to-market approach

Building a Gen AI-Powered Content Engine: Identifying High-Impact Use Case, Scaling Solutions, and Embedding AI into Workflows

Torsten Brodt will talk about how marketing organizations can move beyond experimentation and turn Generative AI into a true growth engine. Drawing on his experience at Telekom, he will outline how an AI-first mindset can transform marketing into an always-on content engine that produces content pieces and thought leadership at scale, in-house, and on demand. Torsten will share his learnings on:

• Structuring pilots and experiments – defining focus areas, identifying high-impact use cases, and establishing clear success metrics to guide early GenAI initiatives
• Building a scalable GenAI setup – orchestrating pilots across teams, prioritizing opportunities, and creating governance that ensures measurable value creation
• Scaling solutions across markets – developing a portfolio of AI-enabled capabilities and overcoming operational challenges to adapt and produce content in-house at scale
• Shifting to integrated, AI-driven workflows – increasing efficiency, adaptability, and quality of marketing content while laying the groundwork for fully connected, agent-based content operations
  

Learnings on Designing for Human Centricity – Redefining Design with Advanced AI and Asking the Right Questions

Federico Casalegno will draw on his extensive experience to share lessons learned on human-centric design. And he will discuss how Samsung is adapting processes and evolving the designer’s role to catalyze human-centric innovation with AI. Federico will share learnings on:

• Leveraging human-centric design – the evolution of design and lessons learned on what works and what doesn’t
  
• Using AI in design and the changing role of designers – adapting the process to a fast-paced iterative approach, asking the right questions, and more
  
• What is needed to design for end-users – and how the roles and competencies need to be redefined to drive new ways of working
  
• Leveraging AI and advanced computing for product innovation – creating products that better fit customer aspirations

The Journey of Implementing AI in Marketing: Managing Change, Leading the Way, and Reinventing Work

Guillaume Roques will talk about Google’s journey of deploying AI in marketing. He will discuss the pitfalls to avoid and the critical elements for success. Guillaume will share learnings on:

• Eating our own dog food – deploying AI across the broad including in creative, management, measurement, and more
  
• Agentifying work – implementing agentic AI in end-to-end workflows
  
• Managing change – embarking the team on the journey, building trust, and showcasing leaders’ use of AI
  
• Leading the way – mastering the marketing engine to move beyond increasing productivity with AI and towards reinventing the work

Building a Marketing Campaign: Generating Actionable Insights for Business Impact and Engaging Target Audience

Hannah Bernard will talk about Avery Dennison’s approach to building a marketing campaign that addresses a sustainability problem while putting business impact at the centre. Building on the launch of Avery Dennison’s Making Possible tagline, Hannah will explore the role of marketing in demonstrating how Avery Dennison is helping to solve some of the world’s most complex challenges. Hannah will share learnings on:

• Building primary research report with economic modelling – leveraging data and creating actionable insights to drive business impact on an industry-wide issue
• Developing the campaign – getting sponsorship and funding, and extracting learnings from the launch
• Driving engagement with the campaign – the approach taken and what worked well in creating return on investment
• Key takeaways from the journey

Transforming Marketing – Focusing on Customer Types & Building a Digital Engine Obsessed on Driving Performance

Thomas Møllgaard will talk about how Schneider Electric transformed its marketing approach. He will discuss how the Nordic Baltic division shifted to co-functional approach and developed a digital marketing engine to drive growth.

Generative AI-Enabled Marketing: Orchestrating Pilots, Scaling Solutions, and Driving AI Transformation

Moritz Klämt will talk about his experience from Henkel Consumer Brands and other large corporations, on how to move Generative AI from the stage of piloting into value creation. He will discuss how the Marketing organization creates a set up to prioritize use cases and enable scaling. Moritz will share learnings on:

• Shaping experiments and pilots – defining focus areas and use cases, prioritizing, and measuring success
• Creating a scalable setup for Gen AI – steering experiments and pilots to ensure effectiveness
• Scaling a Gen AI solution – mapping a portfolio of activities and overcoming challenges to enable local content management
• Expanding from tasks to an end-to-end set up – and steps ahead in driving efficiencies and enabling agentic AI

Leveraging AI for Customer-Centric Growth: Creating Impact at Scale

Loic Stein will outline Amazon’s approach to leveraging innovation and artificial intelligence to drive durable, customer-centric growth. Through the lens of Amazon Key, he will demonstrate how aligning strategic intent with AI-enabled execution accelerates impact at scale.

Driving Action through Partnerships and Innovation towards NetZero

Simon Boas Hoffmeyer will talk about how Carlsberg Group has executed its sustainability programme over many years, and among others achieved more than 60% emissions reduction at their breweries since 2015 and driven absolute reductions in the full value chain despite growth in the recent years. He will further reflect on how the brewer continues to pioneer low-carbon solutions to achieve a net ZERO value chain by 2040. Carlsberg’s practical approach to sustainability-driven innovation:

• Make sustainability interesting for consumers, even if they initially will not pay extra
• Treating sustainable innovation as any other project and using traditional innovation process
• Identifying the most important hot spots to drive down carbon emissions
• Measuring and managing scope 3 emissions using primary data

Inclusive Innovation – Solving Real Customer Problems in a Scalable Way

What happens when we write “Innovation Department” on a door. Do we encourage the rest of the organization to innovate or to stand back? Bilgi Karan will talk about successes and failures in creating an inclusive innovation culture. He will share lessons lear”What happens when we write “Innovation Department” on a door. Do we encourage the rest of the organization to innovate or to stand back? Bilgi Karan will talk about successes and failures in creating an inclusive innovation culture. He will share lessons learned on:

• Focusing on smaller, high leverage initiatives that solve big problems in a scalable way – and the impact of solving boring problems
  
• Power of an innovation network – prioritizing learning, ensuring visibility and top leadership sponsorship, coaching people, and more
  
• Inclusive innovation both for innovators and customers by eliminating idea ownership
  
• Prioritizing user outcomes over business outcomes with the power of UX – and the impact of AI
  
• Knowing how to fail – celebrating failures before, during, and after a project
  

Customer Insights – The Roles of Marketers & Innovators in the age of data/AI, and the Need for Training & Sharing

Stefan Stremersch will lead on a lab on how to optimally use customer insights to supercharge the front-end of innovation. He will introduce some of the most powerful yet often overlooked methods to put voice of the customer in the innovation process. This will be followed by group discussion:

The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Examine how effective their organizations’ current methods are – and where to improve
  
• Understand how to drive intuition based on small data and leverage crowdsourcing to really learn about customer behavior and opportunities
• Learn how to activate Gen AI for needs discovery
  
• Leverage the ‘customer insights wheel’ to foster collabortaion and leverage intuition across areas including co-creation, imaging, and observing

An Inclusive View on Innovation Talent: Mobilizing and Developing People in the Age of AI

Stefan Stremersch will lead a lab on how to build innovation talent by aligning purpose, mobilizing the right people, and developing their proficiency. Drawing on the core Purpose-People-Proficiency framework of his new book The Talent Advantage (Kogan Page, Sep 2025), Stefan will share practical examples on how to drive innovation talent within organizations, and guide participants to:

• Identify the best and worst developed innovation competencies in their firm (knowledge, skills, and attitudes)
  
• Pinpoint critical gaps and explore why they persist despite existing efforts
  
• Discuss how to craft and activate a clear purpose to rally people around innovation talent
  
• Explore how to involve the right people – including leadership – and leverage AI in talent development
  
• Get inspired by practical tools to improve learning journeys and accelerate competency building
  

Participants walk away with a practical, peer-tested approach to strengthen innovation talent in their organization.

More tba

More to be announced

The Evolving Workplace: Designing an Inclusive Employee Experience

Skills for Life Initiative – Building a Skills-Enabled Organization

Bas Puts will talk about Siemens’ approach to building skills as a competitive edge. He will discuss the organization’s journey to enable skills-based decision making. Bas will share learnings on:

• The Skills for Life as one of the three core pillars of People and Organization – alongside
• Leaders who transform and ‘Organize for Impact’
  
• Building the tech infrastructure as the skills intelligence layer – developing an AI-generated and dynamic skills taxonomy and establishing a single source of truth
  
• Defining the skills architecture – focusing on strategic, business-critical, and foundational skills
  
• Developing an operating model to enable skills-based decision making – ensuring transparency and context integration
  
• Key learnings including running POCs to understand interdependencies, and more

Using AI to Drive Neuro-Inclusion

Suzanne Dee Pedersen will talk about Novo Nordisk’s approach to leveraging AI to advance inclusion. Drawing on early experiences, she will reflect on how AI is being used to removing barriers for neurodivergent employees and support more inclusive ways of working. Suzanne will share insights on:

• Kicking off the journey to explore AI’s potential in supporting neurodivergent employees – the approach and motivation
  
• A practical model designed to empower employees in managing their workday, including the use of targeted prompts
  
• Early results and learnings – and what’s next on the journey
  

Creating Best-in-Class Workspace: Enabling Connections and Enhancing Employee Experience and Culture 

Roger Morawski will talk about Sanofi’s approach to building a best-in-class workplace experience. He will discuss how the organization takes a data-driven approach to create a space that connects people. Roger will share insights on:

• Workspace as a culture and engagement pillar – setting up the team and thinking beyond the traditional workspace across different company facilities
• Exploring best-in-class experiences and listening to employees to hone in on an exceptional experience and define a 360 strategy
• Creating spaces where people can connect and collaborate – driving culture evolution, enhancing employee experience, and measuring results
• Achieving results and steps ahead including a living lab to measure the impact of innovative WX solutions

Humanizing Tech for High Performance: Culture and Leadership as Performance Multipliers

Andreas Voigt will talk about taking a human-centric approach to driving high performance at Nokia. He will discuss why the human side matters for scaling technology and how culture and leadership work as multipliers for high performance. Andreas will share learnings on:

• The current trends impacting work – the expectations in the AI world, and the need to keep the focus on people engagement
• Building a culture of belonging and inclusion – progressing to Play to Win and Perform to Win while maintaining the balance with wellbeing
• Leveraging an AI-powered platform to identify the right nudges to build the culture at team level and support them with business needs
• Leadership as a multiplier – building leadership communities, focusing on the soft skills, and driving empathy and relationship building

Driving Diversity and Inclusion: Taking a Holistic Approach, Tracking Impact, and Engaging Leadership

Heidi Robertson will talk about ABB’s approach to furthering Diversity and Inclusion. She will discuss how the organization connects Diversity and Inclusion with company DNA to create tangible impact. Heidi will share learnings on:

• The three strategic D&I pillars – creating governance to steer projects and track impact, driving inclusive leadership and culture, and partnering
• Training top leaders in leading with empathy and building psychological safety – ensuring accountability and having a sponsorship model for leaders
• Launching different diversity and inclusion initiatives including Come as you are, global parental leave policy, and more
• Key takeaways including the need for CEO support, grassroots mobilization, clear vision and KPIs, and more

Rethinking Work and Organizations for an AI World – The Key Elements to Consider

Eric Cornu will talk about the future of work and HR in the AI era. He will discuss the key elements to consider in making decisions and rethinking the way works get done. Eric will share insights on:

• Current impact and implications of AI – and how to move past too many pilots that don’t deliver on expectations towards a more directed approach
  
• The impact of AI on HR – the key elements that can help guide and support decision making on where and how to integrate and leverage AI
  
• The role of AI in the future of work – illustrating Nestlé’ approach through initiatives and how AI enables a greater level of granularity
  
• Future of organizations in an AI world – and how to rethink the way work is organized and managed
  

Transforming Towards a Focused Tech Company – Driving Agility and Enabling Skill-Based Collaboration

Tim Holzapfel will talk about how Siemens transformed the organization from a conglomerate to a focused tech company by embedding collaboration and agility. He will discuss how the role of the HQ changed, how a digital transformation tool enabled collaboration and the change ways of working and how digitalization & data driven organization enables AI use cases. Tim will share insights on:

• The transformation of a conglomerate into a focused tech company and how the role of the HQ changes
  
• Overall how the organization of work is changing after a century of Taylorism and working in hierarchies
  towards collaboration, project work and agility on all levels
  
• How a Collaboration View in addition to a classical orgchart supports the transformation of how work is
  being organized and made visible
  
• What importance digitalization, a data driven focus, and AI/GenAI use cases enable the matching of
  employees & managers as well as skills & domain expertise required in agile organizations

Rewiring the Organization for AI Transformation

Anne Kathrin Gebhardt will talk about Bosch Digital’s approach to rethinking the organization for the future. She will discuss how the organization explores structuring work for the future and rethinks organizational design. Anne will share insights on:

• Key aspects in considering rewiring the organization for an AI future – and identifying what is already in place
  
• Creating new talent pipelines – from hiring AI natives to ensuring leaders support a learning environment
  
• Exploring what augmented work looks like – and weaving new people and skills into the organization
  
• Use cases illustrating the approach, hypotheses, and key focus areas
  
• Key takeaways on starting the journey and adapting to local maturity levels – and the steps ahead