Labs
Immersive sessions with short presentations and group discussions / exercises facilitated by professors and corporate experts

Cordelia Krooss
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.
Exploring the Common Pitfalls of Adopting Agile within R&D
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.
- Innovation Lab
- Agile Organization, Culture & Leadership for Innovation

Eric Tachibana
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.
A Peculiarily Amazonian Approach to Cultural Transformation
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:
- Explore the elements of Amazon’s culture that enable innovation
- Self-assess own company culture and work in groups to compare and discuss results
- Learn how to go from one cultural model to another
- Innovation Lab
- HR Lab
- Agile Organization, Culture & Leadership for Innovation

Ludvig Liljekvist
Global Sustainability Insight and Foresight Leader
IKEA
Trying to enjoy the journey, not the end. Being a student of my three small teachers in life. Last decade with Ingka Group (IKEA) working with sustainability and innovation, strategy.
Creating Visions and Stories for a People and Planet Positive Future
This interactive session will combine an individual exercise and group discussions on envisioning products in and related aspects in different future world’s contexts.
- Innovation Lab
- Innovation for Sustainability and Circular Economy

David Robertson
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.
Putting the Platinum Rule of Innovation into Practice: Applying Cherokee Values to Your Innovation Process
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:
- Learn the platinum rule of design and understand the 12 languages of empathy
- Play a card game to use the 12 languages of empathy to work on either innovating on a selected product or to inspire organizational change
- Innovation Lab
- HR Lab
- Agile Organization, Culture & Leadership for Innovation
- Customer Centric Innovation and Design Thinking

Robert Austin
Professor, Innovation & Digital Transformation
Ivey Business School
Robert D. Austin is a Professor of Information Systems and Innovation at Ivey Business School, and an affiliated faculty member at Harvard Medical School. Prior to his current appointments, he was Professor of Management of Innovation and Digital Transformation at Copenhagen Business School, and before that, a professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. He is author or co-author of eight books, most recently The Adventures of an IT Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016) and has published in many academic and practitioner journals, e.g. Harvard Business Review. He has held managerial positions at Ford and Novell, and served as CEO of the largest executive education provider in northern Europe. His research focuses on innovation, digital transformation, managing creative companies, and talent and performance management.
Digital Transformation at GE: What Went Wrong?
As recently as five years ago, GE was held up as an example of how companies should do digital transformation. They were not waiting to be forced to change, people said, they were “disrupting themselves.” They invested heavily, creating an entirely new GE Digital division, aspiring to become a “top ten software company.” People believed them, partly because of GE’s longstanding reputation as one of the world’s best managed companies. But in 2018, it became apparent that this ambitious transformation had veered off course. The company fell into an extended and deep crisis. In November 2021, the company announced that it would split up, which the Wall Street Journal described as “the end of the GE we knew” and a page turning in business history.
In this interactive lab, we will discuss what they were trying to do and how they tried to do it, in an effort to figure out what went wrong. Our end objective will be to extract lessons relevant to all companies about how to succeed in established firms with digital transformation — what the GE story can tell us about mistakes to avoid and how we should proceed.
- Innovation Lab
- Digital Innovation and Transformation

Michael McKay
Head of Design Thinking and UX Design
Ørsted
With a broad background in design leadership, product innovation, user centred design thinking and launch of innovative global products and services, Michael now focuses on building human centered innovation cultures in large size organisations. His hands-on leadership approach has brought him to companies like Amazon, PayPal, eBay, Nokia and Lego as well as several startups. He currently leads the UX and design thinking practice at Ørsted, a leading renewable energy company.
At Ørsted, Michael oversees the creation of the Design Thinking strategy while maturing the UX design function for the company. This includes operational, strategic and cultural ways to embed design and design thinking in a program at global scale in conjunction with the agile transformation into SAFe (Scaled Agile Frameworks).
Michael lectures and teaches at several design schools and MBA programmes in design thinking and design strategy. He has recently been appointed adjunct professor of Design at the Royal Academy of Architecture and Design in Copenhagen (KADK). Furthermore he actively pursues communities and partnerships that rethink design in concert with the fields of Psychology, Business development and Marketing in an effort to create new frameworks for change.
Thinking Visually and Building Stories – Leveraging Rich Narratives in Innovation
Michael McKay will lead a lab on how to use rich narratives in innovation. He will start the lab off by explaining the reasons for using narratives, and will introduce a template for participants to use in crafting their own storylines. Michael will also share different variations of narratives to serve as inspiration. The lab participants will learn and work on the following:
- Understand the role narratives can play in innovation – and learn how to use narratives and build a storyline in their own work
- Craft a storyline around a theme using provided visual props or their own sketches
- Create a short film to document the storyline
- Harvest learnings, share, and view other participants’ work during video screening of films
- Innovation Lab
- Customer Centric Innovation and Design Thinking

Ken Webster
Visting Fellow
Cranfield University
Ken Webster is a leading figure in the development of the theory and practice of a circular economy in its 21st century guise. He was, until recently Head of Innovation for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation* and helped establish the intellectual basis of their approach from its inception in 2010 through to 2018. He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter Business School’s Centre for Circular Economy where he is leading on the establishment of an International Society for Circular Economy in tandem with a number of leading academics across the globe. He is guest researcher at Linköping University in Sweden.
His book The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows (2nd Edition 2017) relates the connections between systems thinking, economic and business opportunity and the transition to a circular economy. He makes regular contributions to conferences, workshops and seminars around the world. His current interests include total product liability, open vs closed circular economy loops and the relationship between large and small scales in the creation of effective economic systems. He is a supervisory Board member of the Dutch Madaster Foundation, a materials passport initiative in the built environment.
*The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s aim is to accelerate the transition from a linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy to a circular economy
Four Elements of the Circular Economy: A Systemic View
Abstract tba
- Innovation Lab
- Gamechanging Innovation and New Business Models
- Innovation for Sustainability and Circular Economy

Ian Machan
Senior Industrial Fellow
Aston Business School
Ian Machan’s expertise, developed throughout his 40 years working with manufacturing businesses, are in supply chain, strategy and continuous improvement. Executive roles, both permanent and interim in the healthcare sector, followed an engineering and production career in traditional manufacturing and fast moving food consumer goods.
An experienced university industrial fellow, for the Advanced Services Group, Ian now leads their advisory services, including organisational development workshops, executive education and commissioned projects. He has worked extensively with several multi-billion dollar businesses in their transformation journey towards a servitized value offering.
How Product Manufacturers Can Develop Advanced Service Offers
Presentation: Based on the research and practical experience of The Advanced Services Group at Aston Business School, Ian Machan will present frameworks and tools to help manufacturing companies develop their own advanced services:
- How competing through services leads to alternative services goals
- The services staircase of basic, intermediate and advanced services – examples and its relation to digital technology
- Four elements of the business model related to servitizing a manufacturer
- Transformation roadmap with four key phases and four moving forces
- Organizational challenges of moving to advanced services and the issue of integrated or separate business units Group
Exercise: Snakes and ladders service transformation game is an interactive group exercise that shares previous experiences in moving into advanced services. Using a snakes and ladder game format, the players are challenged to explore how the typical experiences of others would impact on their own company and their own potential to move into advanced services. It offers a tool to engage with others back in the home organization and jointly anticipate risks.
- Innovation Lab
- Gamechanging Innovation and New Business Models
- Digital Innovation and Transformation

Karolin Frankenberger
Professor of Strategic Management
University of St.Gallen
Description tba
The Digital Transformer’s Dilemma – How to Energize the Core Business while Building Disruptive Products and Services
Abstract tba
- HR Lab
- Gamechanging Innovation and New Business Models
- Digital Innovation and Transformation

Ammon Salter
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.
Developing Your Technologists: Adapting Incentives, Career Tracks, and HR Approaches to Harness the Talents of R&D Staff
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:
- Understand the tensions in harnessing the talent of R&D staff – and learn how these tensions map onto the company strategy and culture and what the trade-offs are in resolving them
- Learn what motivates R&D staff and what some of the good practices are
- Self-assess practices from own organizations and identify challenges
- Work in groups to compare, discuss, and share good practices
- Harvest discussion results
- HR Lab
- Talent Acquisition & Management