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

Dennis Heider
IT Business & Service Design/Agile Coach
Volkswagen
Dennis Heider, originally from a little village in Lower Saxony, found his passion for Corporate Innovation & Entrepreneurship over the last 10 years working experience. In 2013, he joined the Volkswagen Group IT upon his graduation from the School of International Business and Entrepreneurship. He obtained a job-integrated Master degree as a full-time employee at Deutsche Telekom AG. After working as a Product Manager at the Volkswagen Digital:Lab with Lean Startup Principles, he joined the Volkswagen Group Ideation:Hub in 2018 to combine business understanding with the user-centered mindset. Dennis is currently working as a qualified agile IT Coach for the Organizational Transformation on Business Agility, Design Thinking and Lean Startup. His focus lies on Business and Service Design in order to support Volkswagen Group brands in customer-centric product development.
Success Factors of a Creative Climate: Dimensions of Innovation Culture & Examples of Good Practices
The “Innovation Roundtable” is one result of a question we are all facing everyday: “how to deal with all the global changes?”.
The continuous run for the new – whether it is to compete on the market, to win customers or to develop new products – this is what brings us to Copenhagen.
The lab aims to identify the right organizational conditions for training the muscle for this run: The creativity muscle.
Creativity is a core competency to answer the global changes. So, in the lab we are learning which dimensions of creativity can be fostered by an organization.
Participants assess their working environment and exchange about the best factors of creativity within the group discussion.
At the end, every participant should own an individual set of examples and ideas how to influence and build a true environment for creativity within their organizations.
“
- Business Model Innovation, Intrapreneurship & Future Scenarios
- Digital Innovation & Transformation
- Innovation Lab

Michael Haenlein
Professor of Marketing
ESCP Business School
Michael is a Professor at ESCP Business School, where he teaches Customer Value Management and the impact of digital technologies on firms' Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies. He is leading in the Responsible Research in Business & Management (RRBM) movement, holds the chair in Responsible Research in Marketing at University Liverpool Management School, and visiting position at Trinity College Dublin & Kozminski University. Michael is one of the world's 10 most influential Marketing thinkers and is part of the Top 50 people in Marketing (Google Scholar). In 2020 he was included in the Clarviate highly cited researcher ranking. He is the most cited researcher in the field of "Word-of-Mouth," among the top three in the field of "Customer Relationship Management," and among the top ten in the area of "Social Influence." Prof Haenlein is a well-known consultant with cross-industry sector expertise from telecommunications to private equity. Michael holds a Ph.D. from the WHU, Otto Beisheim School of Management (2004), and a habilitation from the Pantheon-Sorbonne University (2013).
How Virtual Worlds impact Consumers, Firms, and Real Life: Exploring Challenges and Opportunities of the Metaverse on Four Dimensions
Despite the current popularity of the metaverse, it is often unclear what the term means. Many forget that the metaverse (or virtual worlds) has been a topic of conversation for the past decade. Michael Haenlein will lead a lab on this topic and introduce his framework delineating key implications for marketing. This will be followed by a group discussion. Lab participants will learn and explore the following:
- Define what the metaverse is and whether it even makes sense to speak of THE metaverse
- Analyzing what the metaverse means for consumer behavior, marketing strategy, spillover, and marketing analytics
- Exploring challenges and opportunities of the metaverse either in a B2B or a B2C group focusing on a selected element of the framework
- Harvest the discussion results
- Digital Marketing, Martech & Multichannel
- Marketing Lab

Wolfgang Ulaga
Professor of Management Practice
INSEAD
Wolfgang ULAGA is a Senior Affiliate Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France. He is a global B2B thought leader on service and solution strategy design and execution. Wolfgang regularly consults with companies, serves as a frequent keynote speaker, and leads executive education workshops worldwide across many industries.
Wolfgang’s research focuses on how B2B firms strategically move from products to services and solutions, develop data-driven service business models, excel in service pricing, turn free services into profit engines (Free-to-Fee), and transform product-centric into service-savvy sales organizations. Recent projects focus on monetizing digital innovations that combine products and services, hardware and software, analytics and data.
Wolfgang has published numerous articles in leading journals, including Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review, He is the author of several books, including Monetizing Data: A Practical Roadmap for Framing, Pricing, and Selling your B2B Digital Offers and Service Strategy in Action.
Customer Engagement 2.0 in a Subscription Economy: What’s Next?
Technology and digital transformation blur the boundaries between products and services, hardware and software, data and analytics. More than ever, customers seek agility and flexibility; their goals and priorities rapidly shift. Consumer preferences gravitate from ownership to usership; business customers seek to meet new sustainability goals. Against this background, fast-growing subscription-based recurring revenue models seem the perfect answer. They increasingly gain traction, and many have talked about the coming “Subscription tsunami”.
What does this massive trend mean for both B2B and B2C companies? How to engage meaningfully with customers, especially in these challenging times? In this session, we discuss Customer Engagement 2.0 in a Subscription Economy, review challenges and best practices of firms relentlessly focusing on Customer Success – 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Finally, we discuss implications for ENGIE.
- Customer Experience, Insight & Engagement
- Marketing Lab
- Marketing Organization & Transformation

Michael McKay
Head of Ørsted Design Center of Excellence
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
- Design Thinking, Customer Centricity & Front End
- Innovation Lab
- Marketing Lab

Camilla Damgaard-Soerensen
UX & Product Design Specialist
Novo Nordisk
Camilla Damgaard-Sørensen is a UX Design Specialist and Design Thinking Expert with Novo Nordisk Device Delivery Solutions where she leads the design of digital and physical user experiences for tomorrow’s medical devices. She believes in the power of design and focuses on health care innovation and other areas where design can drive positive change for people and the planet.
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.
- Design Thinking, Customer Centricity & Front End
- Innovation Lab
- Marketing Lab

Ludvig Liljekvist
Global Sustainability Insight and Foresight Leader
IKEA
Nobody knows the future but we have the agency to shape it. Last decade with Ingka Group (IKEA) working with people, planet and digital transformation through converging design-, innovation-, strategy-, storytelling- and foresight practices.
Co-creating Visions, Solutions and Stories for a People and Planet Positive Future
Learn about how people and planet exponential developments have shaped our past, shaping our present and why humans need to use our agency to shape a better future for people and planet. Explore a people and planet positive future world and together with others imagine your role in shaping it. You will leave with an understanding about the Anthropocene, future thinking, what does a better future look and feel like and how your business could be part of shaping it.
- Design Thinking, Customer Centricity & Front End
- Innovation for Sustainability, Circularity & Net Zero
- Innovation Lab

Carsten Linz
Distinguished Fellow ESMT and Member of Expert Network WEF
ESMT Berlin
Top 100 Digital Influencer, Author Radical Business Model Transformation, Global Head Center for Digital Leadership. Carsten Linz is an entrepreneurial leader with more than twenty years of business experience and a proven track record for driving innovation, growth, and transformation.
He serves as digital advisory board member, advises CEOs of fast-growing companies, is an active business angel and member of the investment committee of Europe’s largest seed stage fund. He successfully built-up several €100 mio. businesses and led company-wide transformation programs affecting more than 60.000 employees. He is a sought-after keynote speaker (listed at London Speaker Bureau) and panelist at conferences around the world.
As adjunct faculty member, he teaches in Executive Programs at Mannheim Business School, University of St. Gallen and Stanford Graduate School. He published several books including his recent best-seller “Radical Business Model Transformation: Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World” (Top-Business Book 2017, Translations: Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Hungarian). His articles appeared in renowned journals such as Forbes, Harvard Business Review/Manager, ZDNet, CIO Magazine, Computerwoche, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, D!gitalist Magazine.
As Business Development Officer at SAP SE he repeatedly leads the build-up and scale-out of new businesses. In his role as Global Head of the Center for Digital Leadership, he drives SAP’s own digital transformation and acts as advisor to other CEOs, Chief Digital Officers, and CIOs by showcasing next-generation digital innovation and transformation approaches.
Dr. Linz holds a PhD in Innovation Management from University of Bern/Switzerland (“summa cum laude”) and a Diploma degree in Economic Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (“with honors”). He studied System Dynamics and Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management, Leading Change and Organizational Renewal at Harvard Business School, and Corporate Strategy at INSEAD Fontainebleau.
He was named “Top-100 Digital Influencer”, awarded as “Innovation Landmark” by the German President, honored with the coveted “Award of Excellence” from the Global Institute of Logistics and ranked as “Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. He is an advisory member of the World Economic Forum’s “Digital Enterprise” and “Digital Platforms and Digital Ecosystems” projects.
He supports Social Entrepreneurs as Advisory Board Member of Social Impact, Berlin.
He is married, has one daughter, and lives in Frankfurt/Main.
Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World: How to Craft & Lead a Radical Business Transformation?
It is a critical time for most incumbent organizations: their existing business models are failing, and they struggle to adapt to the fast-paced technological change. Corporations need to fight back as they have a big unfair advantage with their deep domain expertise, large customer base, strong brands and vast intellectual property.
This lab offers inspiration and a proven blueprint to upgrade business models and get it fit for the digital economy. It kicks-off with a 20 min foundational presentation and is followed by break-outs with groups of 6-8 participants. The format is based on Carsten Linz’s best-selling book ‘Radical Business Model Transformation: Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World’, which is considered a standard reference in business model and transformation literature. Join the movement to innovate for the future instead of digitizing the past!
Lab participants will:
- Get to know a highly effective strategic framework and learn through numerous case studies the patterns of successful business model and digital transformations and what separates the winners from the losers.
- Work in groups on own innovation-led transformation challenges and develop a (first) transformation path for one of the participants real-world cases with the help of the Business Transformation Board.
- Explore how project, team and organization leaders need to rethink leadership to pioneer the fourth industrial revolution. Learn how to apply the next-practice capabilities of NewLeadership and get your firm’s executive team on board.
- Business Model Innovation, Intrapreneurship & Future Scenarios
- Digital Innovation & Transformation
- Innovation Lab
- Marketing Lab
- Marketing Organization & Transformation

Amit Joshi
Professor of AI, Analytics and Marketing Strategy
IMD
Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics and Marketing Strategy at IMD. He is the Program Director of the Digital Analytics open program, and the co-director of the program on Artificial Intelligence. In 2020, he was named a ‘Digital Shaper’ in Switzerland, as one of a handful of individuals who would shape the digital economy in the future.
Amit is an award-winning professor and researcher and has interacted with a variety of corporate clients in several industries, including telecom, banking and financial services, media, manufacturing, retailing, pharma, education and automobiles. Previously, he worked for Cadbury India Ltd., a company that is now a part of the Mondelez International group.
Amit’s research, which focuses on long-run marketing strategy, analytics and AI applications, has been published in top journals, including Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Culture, Journal of Cultural Economics and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. His research has twice won the MSI / H. Paul Root Award, for the best paper in the Journal of Marketing (2010 and 2015) the Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award (2006) for the MSI publication with the most long-term impact and bee nominated for the Sheth Foundation Award for long-term contributions. His dissertation won an honorable mention in the 2004 Alden G. Clayton Dissertation Proposal Competition. He is also an award-winning case writer.
His research and opinions have been extensively covered in the popular press and media, appearing in outlets including NPR, CNN, NBC, Nikkei, Fast Company, Business Standard, Fox News, Bloomberg, Forbes, Investor Relations Magazine, The Conversation, and Science Daily.
Amit earned his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune, a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (P.G.D.M.) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, India, and a Ph.D. is from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Ethical Boundaries in Leveraging Machine Learning for Marketing – Making Tradeoffs and Minding the Slippery Slope of Data Use
Machine learning can help marketers make forecasts and assess innovation adoption. Amit Joshi will lead a lab on the ethics of data gathering and use – and resulting tradeoffs. He will start the lab off with a short introduction to the slippery slope in crossing the ethical boundaries to making predictions more accurate, followed by a hands-on group simulation exercise and discussion. The lab participants will learn and discuss the following:
- How data can lead to a slippery slope, crossing ethical lines, albeit not legal ones
- Making a projection on earnings, in the form of a simulation exercise, and determine the accuracy of data needed at each stage
- Discuss the issues and ethical boundaries from the exercise, and resulting tradeoffs
- Digital Marketing, Martech & Multichannel
- Marketing Lab

Dennis Heider
IT Business & Service Design/Agile Coach
Volkswagen
Dennis Heider, originally from a little village in Lower Saxony, found his passion for Corporate Innovation & Entrepreneurship over the last 10 years working experience. In 2013, he joined the Volkswagen Group IT upon his graduation from the School of International Business and Entrepreneurship. He obtained a job-integrated Master degree as a full-time employee at Deutsche Telekom AG. After working as a Product Manager at the Volkswagen Digital:Lab with Lean Startup Principles, he joined the Volkswagen Group Ideation:Hub in 2018 to combine business understanding with the user-centered mindset. Dennis is currently working as a qualified agile IT Coach for the Organizational Transformation on Business Agility, Design Thinking and Lean Startup. His focus lies on Business and Service Design in order to support Volkswagen Group brands in customer-centric product development.
Success Factors of a Creative Climate: Dimensions of Innovation Culture & Examples of Good Practices
The “Innovation Roundtable” is one result of a question we are all facing everyday: “how to deal with all the global changes?”.
The continuous run for the new – whether it is to compete on the market, to win customers or to develop new products – this is what brings us to Copenhagen.
The lab aims to identify the right organizational conditions for training the muscle for this run: The creativity muscle.
Creativity is a core competency to answer the global changes. So, in the lab we are learning which dimensions of creativity can be fostered by an organization.
Participants assess their working environment and exchange about the best factors of creativity within the group discussion.
At the end, every participant should own an individual set of examples and ideas how to influence and build a true environment for creativity within their organizations.
“
- Business Model Innovation, Intrapreneurship & Future Scenarios
- Digital Innovation & Transformation
- Innovation Lab

Hansjörg Reick
Senior Director Global Business Development
P&G
In Global Business Development, Hansjörg creates new business models and partnerships for strategic, global innovation and sustainability programs and leads the Startup Center of Expertise for Procter & Gamble in Europe.
Previously, he held various leadership positions in research, development and engineering of transformative consumer health and medical device products and services, particularly for the OralB brand’s electric toothbrush portfolio and the company's first smart/IoT devices. In Corporate R&D Connect+Develop, Hansjörg led European Open Innovation and Public Funding.
Hansjörg fosters a holistic, multidisciplinary and consumer-centric approach to innovation. He is a catalyst for agile transformation and introduced Scrum and Lean Startup to physical product development and engineering. Hansjörg holds more than 50 patents and is a Fellow of AIMBE, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Building Value-Adding Tech Partnerships & Business Models to Solve Big Problems – Exploring Three Collaboration Vectors
Hansjörg Reick will lead a lab on how companies can partner around technology to create value for all sides. He will briefly introduce P&G’s partnership approach including how the company partners up for commercializing internal technology, which models exist for that, and how profit is split. Hansjörg will proceed to explain three vectors and their sub-elements that will be the focus of a world café style group discussion.
Lab participants will discuss the following vectors within dedicated discussion groups:
- Vector 1: What kind of technology do you consider for external value creation efforts – and how does this align with overall business strategy and goals
- Vector 2: What are the formats and models for such partnerships – including licensing, JVs etc.
- Vector 3: How to define value and the right profit split – exploring multiple value dimensions
- Harvesting discussion results
- Business Model Innovation, Intrapreneurship & Future Scenarios
- Innovation for Sustainability, Circularity & Net Zero
- Innovation Lab
- Startup Collaboration, Open Innovation & Ecosystems

Eduardo Andrade
Professor of Marketing
Imperial College Business School
Eduardo Andrade is Professor of Marketing at Imperial College Business School and the co-Director of the MSc Programme on Climate Change, Management & Finance. He was previously Assistant and Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of Consumer Psychology at FGV-EBAPE in Rio de Janeiro.
As a behavioural researcher, Prof. Andrade has been interested in how individuals feel, think and make decisions in contexts related to sustainable consumption, inequality, and health. His articles have appeared in leading marketing (Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research), medicine/public health (Lancet, Public Health Nutrition, Preventive Medicine, JAMA Network Open), and psychology journals (Psychological Science, Nature Human Behaviour), among others.
Meeting Barriers to Sustainability Head-On – Exploring How Your Company Can Turn Obstacles into Opportunities
Despite the climate urgency and the importance of lifestyle changes to help tackle it, many consumers are either unwilling or incapable of purchasing, consuming, and disposing sustainably. Eduardo Andrade will lead a lab on the obstacles and opportunities to sustainable consumption. He will start the lab off by introducing a framework of three types of obstacles to sustainable consumption – market, individual, and societal. This will be followed by group discussions with a focus on identifying the strongest barrier(s) and exploring ways to overcome them.
The participants will learn and discuss the following:
- Understand each of the factors that lead to the market, psychological, and societal barriers to sustainability – from quality to convenience through impact to habit formation
- Self-assess the strength of each of the barriers in your own company/industry
- Discuss the results of self-assessments across the group to identify patterns in the strength of barriers – and how the ratings may depend on industry and other factors
- Explore approaches to transforming the highest ranked obstacle(s) into opportunities
- Harvest the discussion results
- Innovation for Sustainability, Circularity & Net Zero
- Innovation Lab

Dennis Heider
IT Business & Service Design/Agile Coach
Volkswagen
Dennis Heider, originally from a little village in Lower Saxony, found his passion for Corporate Innovation & Entrepreneurship over the last 10 years working experience. In 2013, he joined the Volkswagen Group IT upon his graduation from the School of International Business and Entrepreneurship. He obtained a job-integrated Master degree as a full-time employee at Deutsche Telekom AG. After working as a Product Manager at the Volkswagen Digital:Lab with Lean Startup Principles, he joined the Volkswagen Group Ideation:Hub in 2018 to combine business understanding with the user-centered mindset. Dennis is currently working as a qualified agile IT Coach for the Organizational Transformation on Business Agility, Design Thinking and Lean Startup. His focus lies on Business and Service Design in order to support Volkswagen Group brands in customer-centric product development.
Leveraging Digital Business Modelling
Jannis is working within the Volkswagen’s Ideation Hub that functions as an internal creative agency. He will lead a lab on digital business modelling with a Digital Canvas. He will briefly introduce the Hub’s approach to leveraging digital business modelling with the Digital Canvas followed by a try-out and exploration of the framework in discussion groups. The lab participants will learn and discuss the following:
- Try out the digital canvas framework with learning by doing
- Get to know specific methods used within the framework
- Harvest the results from the method try-out and discussion
- Business Model Innovation, Intrapreneurship & Future Scenarios
- Innovation Lab

John Mullins
Associate Professor of Management Practice, Marketing and Entrepreneurship
London Business School
John Mullins is an Associate Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School. He has published five books, dozens of cases and more than 50 articles in a variety of outlets, including Harvard Business Review, the MIT Sloan Management Review, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a sought-after speaker and educator for audiences in entrepreneurship and innovation.
John’s first trade book, The New Business Road Test: What Entrepreneurs and Executives Should Do Before Launching a Lean Start-Up, has become the definitive work on the assessment and shaping of entrepreneurial opportunities and is widely employed in universities worldwide.
His second book, the critically acclaimed Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model, co-authored with Randy Komisar, a partner at the esteemed venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, was named to “Best Books of 2009” lists by BusinessWeek and INC Magazine.
John’s third book, The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance or Grow Your Company with Your Customers’ Cash, was named one of five “not-to-be-missed books” for 2014 by Fortune magazine. It challenges the commonly held assumption that among an innovator’s first and most important tasks is that of raising capital. Its material provides the foundation for John’s widely viewed online course on Coursera.
John’s forthcoming book, Counter-Conventional: How the Six Break-the-Rules Mindsets of Entrepreneurs Can Help Anyone Change the World, enables practitioners to apply these entrepreneurial mindsets to their innovation challenges.
John has done executive education on five continents for a variety of organizations both large and small and has served on the boards of fast-growing companies in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia.
Become Counter-Conventional: How the Six Break-The-Rules Mindsets of Entrepreneurs Can Help You Change Your Company and Change the World
Every business these days wants its people to be more “entrepreneurial,” it seems. Rarely, however, do their leaders know exactly what they mean. Do they want more out-of-the-box thinking? Probably. More innovation? For sure. Do they want more risk? Not so much!
This Lab, based on John’s forthcoming book, Counter-Conventional, will bring to life the six break-the-rules mindsets of entrepreneurs that can help anyone to challenge assumptions, off-load risk, and overcome obstacles that stand in their way to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. Surprisingly, perhaps, these mindsets run counter to the conventional wisdom that’s typically found in large and well-established companies. They fly in the face of what’s taught in business schools about strategy, core competencies, target marketing, financing and more.
Working in small breakout groups, Lab participants will:
- Apply one or more of these mindsets to an innovation challenge they currently face
- Develop a one-page action plan for putting one or more of their new mindsets to work to resolve that challenge.
- Business Model Innovation, Intrapreneurship & Future Scenarios
- Culture & Leadership for Innovation & Agility
- Innovation Lab

Ludvig Liljekvist
Global Sustainability Insight and Foresight Leader
IKEA
Nobody knows the future but we have the agency to shape it. Last decade with Ingka Group (IKEA) working with people, planet and digital transformation through converging design-, innovation-, strategy-, storytelling- and foresight practices.
Co-creating Visions, Solutions and Stories for a People and Planet Positive Future
Learn about how people and planet exponential developments have shaped our past, shaping our present and why humans need to use our agency to shape a better future for people and planet. Explore a people and planet positive future world and together with others imagine your role in shaping it. You will leave with an understanding about the Anthropocene, future thinking, what does a better future look and feel like and how your business could be part of shaping it.
- Design Thinking, Customer Centricity & Front End
- Innovation for Sustainability, Circularity & Net Zero
- Innovation Lab

Carsten Linz
Distinguished Fellow ESMT and Member of Expert Network WEF
ESMT Berlin
Top 100 Digital Influencer, Author Radical Business Model Transformation, Global Head Center for Digital Leadership. Carsten Linz is an entrepreneurial leader with more than twenty years of business experience and a proven track record for driving innovation, growth, and transformation.
He serves as digital advisory board member, advises CEOs of fast-growing companies, is an active business angel and member of the investment committee of Europe’s largest seed stage fund. He successfully built-up several €100 mio. businesses and led company-wide transformation programs affecting more than 60.000 employees. He is a sought-after keynote speaker (listed at London Speaker Bureau) and panelist at conferences around the world.
As adjunct faculty member, he teaches in Executive Programs at Mannheim Business School, University of St. Gallen and Stanford Graduate School. He published several books including his recent best-seller “Radical Business Model Transformation: Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World” (Top-Business Book 2017, Translations: Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Hungarian). His articles appeared in renowned journals such as Forbes, Harvard Business Review/Manager, ZDNet, CIO Magazine, Computerwoche, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, D!gitalist Magazine.
As Business Development Officer at SAP SE he repeatedly leads the build-up and scale-out of new businesses. In his role as Global Head of the Center for Digital Leadership, he drives SAP’s own digital transformation and acts as advisor to other CEOs, Chief Digital Officers, and CIOs by showcasing next-generation digital innovation and transformation approaches.
Dr. Linz holds a PhD in Innovation Management from University of Bern/Switzerland (“summa cum laude”) and a Diploma degree in Economic Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (“with honors”). He studied System Dynamics and Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management, Leading Change and Organizational Renewal at Harvard Business School, and Corporate Strategy at INSEAD Fontainebleau.
He was named “Top-100 Digital Influencer”, awarded as “Innovation Landmark” by the German President, honored with the coveted “Award of Excellence” from the Global Institute of Logistics and ranked as “Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. He is an advisory member of the World Economic Forum’s “Digital Enterprise” and “Digital Platforms and Digital Ecosystems” projects.
He supports Social Entrepreneurs as Advisory Board Member of Social Impact, Berlin.
He is married, has one daughter, and lives in Frankfurt/Main.
Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World: How to Craft & Lead a Radical Business Transformation?
It is a critical time for most incumbent organizations: their existing business models are failing, and they struggle to adapt to the fast-paced technological change. Corporations need to fight back as they have a big unfair advantage with their deep domain expertise, large customer base, strong brands and vast intellectual property.
This lab offers inspiration and a proven blueprint to upgrade business models and get it fit for the digital economy. It kicks-off with a 20 min foundational presentation and is followed by break-outs with groups of 6-8 participants. The format is based on Carsten Linz’s best-selling book ‘Radical Business Model Transformation: Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World’, which is considered a standard reference in business model and transformation literature. Join the movement to innovate for the future instead of digitizing the past!
Lab participants will:
- Get to know a highly effective strategic framework and learn through numerous case studies the patterns of successful business model and digital transformations and what separates the winners from the losers.
- Work in groups on own innovation-led transformation challenges and develop a (first) transformation path for one of the participants real-world cases with the help of the Business Transformation Board.
- Explore how project, team and organization leaders need to rethink leadership to pioneer the fourth industrial revolution. Learn how to apply the next-practice capabilities of NewLeadership and get your firm’s executive team on board.
- Business Model Innovation, Intrapreneurship & Future Scenarios
- Digital Innovation & Transformation
- Innovation Lab
- Marketing Lab
- Marketing Organization & Transformation

George S. Yip
Emeritus Professor of Marketing and Strategy
Imperial College London
George Yip is an expert on China innovation and strategy, having conducted research about China for over 20 years and served on the faculty of the top Chinese business school, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), from 2011 to 2016. Previous academic positions include Dean of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University; and at Harvard, UCLA, Cambridge Judge, and London Business School. Previous business positions include Vice President and Director of Research & Innovation at Capgemini Consulting, senior manager at Price Waterhouse (USA), manager at Unilever, and various boards. Author or co-author of Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Change Makers, and Underdogs: Lessons from China's Innovators (2019), China’s Next Strategic Advantage: From Imitation to Innovation (2016), Strategic Transformation (2013), Managing Global Customers (2007), Asian Advantage: Key Strategies for Winning in the Asia-Pacific Region (1998), and Total Global Strategy (1992 and 2012).
The Rise of Innovation in China and Implications for Non-Chinese Companies
While China has long had a reputation for imitation, Chinese companies are now starting to innovate. Well known Chinese innovators include Alibaba, Haier, Huawei and Tencent, but there are also thousands of smaller Chinese innovators, as yet unknown to the world.
This Lab will begin with a presentation on:
- Characteristics of China’s environment that foster innovation, both on the supply and the demand side.
- The specific nature of Chinese companies’ approach to innovation and the factors driving their foreign expansion.
- An insiders’ view of China’s under-the-radar, globally competitive innovators
- How non-Chinese companies can participate in the Chinese national innovation system, not only for China but also for the world.
The Discussion portion of the Lab will focus on (1) identifying the threats to your company from Chinese innovation, and (2) how your company can innovate in China for both China and the world.
- Innovation in Asia and Globalization of R&D
- Innovation Lab