Spain, “The Innovation Architect”, works with top multinationals on change

Presentation:
‘The Evolution of Leadership: leading change, creativity and innovation in organizations’ (November 18, 1.30pm)

Dr. Paddy Miller is a Professor based in Barcelona, Spain at IESE Business School, University of Navarra, one of the top schools in Europe.  He is also co-author of a new book about to be published The Innovation Architect which focuses on the leadership of innovation in organisation.  In the past fifteen months he has appeared at the World Business Forum in New York as well as being a keynote speaker at events like the World Innovation Forum also held in New York and The HR Directors Summit in the UK.

He has taught on many leadership and general management courses on the senior executive programmes at IESE as well as at Harvard Business School, MIT and the Darden School in Virginia.  During 2008 he was visiting faculty at Columbia Business School.    He has authored and co-authored several other books, most recently Mission Critical Leadership published by McGraw Hill.

Recent in-company assignments have included the World Bank, Abbott Laboratories, Bacardi, Bayer, Boeing, Bosch-Siemens, Bulgari, Ericsson, Henkel AG, Nike, Lufthansa, Thyssen-Krupp, Volkswagen AG, 3i Plc and Visteon Corp.

Presently he has major projects in the US, Asia as well as in Europe.
He is a board member of the Institute of Media and Entertainment in New York and is on the Advisory Board of Vivaldi Partners in New York. In 2001 The American Academy of Management awarded him together with a colleague for their innovative work on globally distributed teams.

USA, Partner IDEO, Professor Design Thinking at the d. School at Stanford University

Deep Conversation:
‘Is this the death of education and the dawn of learning?’ (Nov. 16, 10.00am – 12.30pm)
Afternoon Master Class:
‘Principles of Design Thinking’ (Nov. 16, 2.00 – 5.00pm)
Presentation:
‘The principles of design thinking and the power of play’ (Nov. 18, 3.40pm)

Brendan Boyle, a Partner at IDEO, is passionate about promoting entrepreneurial thinking. Throughout his career, Brendan has invented and licensed more than 150 consumer products, specializing in the design of kid-centric goods, services, and experiences. His background and interests led him to start Skyline, a toy development company that was acquired by IDEO and ultimately became IDEO’s Toy Lab. He also co-authored The Klutz Book of Inventions.

Beyond IDEO, Brendan works as a consulting Associate Professor at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (a.k.a. the d.school), where he teaches “From Play to Innovation,” a course he created, and was named the Knight Favorite Professor. He serves on the Board of the National Institute for Play, a non-profit committed to bringing the knowledge, practices, and benefits of play into public life. Brendan holds a Master’s Degree from the Joint Program for Design at Stanford University and a Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan State University.

ABOUT THE MASTERCLASS:

Principles of Design Thinking
This class will give attendees exposure to the principles of design
thinking. The core of IDEO’s methodology and it’s success has been through
IDEO’s continued focus and development of design thinking. Brendan will
conduct an interactive hands-on session illustrating these principles of
innovation.  The practice of design thinking employs a combination of needs,
problems, insights, opportunities, and rapid prototyping in order to
routinely innovate.

USA, World leading philosopher and cognitive scientist

Deep Conversation:
‘Super-connected world – marvel or myth?’ (November 16, 6.30 – 9.00pm)
Presentation:
Prospective gains and losses from the information explosion (November 17, 9.45am)

Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine and in 1971 moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), and Kinds of Minds (1996). He co-edited The Mind’s I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. In 1998 he published Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin).

Freedom Evolves, was published by Penguin Books in 2003.  Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. His most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon was published in 2006 by Viking Press.

He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

He was the Co-founder and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.

Daniel is also a sculptor.

UK, One of the most influential academics in the field of technology and education globally

Deep Conversation:
‘Is this the death of education and the dawn of learning?’ (November 16, 10.00am – 12.30pm)
Presentation:
Making learning surprising (November 17, 11.30pm)

Stephen Heppell is an English educator who specialises in the use of ICT in education. He is a Professor at Bournemouth University, Chair in New Media Environments, Emeritus Professor Anglia Ruskin University, Visiting Professor University of Wales, Newport. Heppell is best known for his work at Ultralab, part of Anglia Polytechnic University. There, he worked on education projects such as “Learning in the New Millennium”, “Schools OnLine”, development of “Think.com” and “Talking Heads”.

In 2003, Heppell left UltraLab and is now CEO of the education consultancy firm, Heppell.net, a global and flourishing policy and learning consultancy which now has an enviable portfolio of international projects all round the world. Stephen is retained by a number of organisations to help with future policy and direction, including the BBC, as an Associate of KPMG, and is retained by the UK government in Horizon Scanning work to advise of future directions for educational policy.  Stephen is executive chairman of LP+ who are currently developing a Chinese language learning community for 20 million Chinese school students, in partnership with China’s Sun New Media corporation.

Stephen chairs the charity Inclusion Trust http://www.inclusiontrust.org/ with its flagship project for children excluded from school by behaviour or circumstances Notschool.net. Stephen was a founder board member for Teachers.TV – a UK public service TV and broadband channel for professional development of teachers.

“Europe’s leading online education expert” Microsoft 2006
“the most influential academic of recent years in the field of technology and education” (Department for Education and Skills – UK)
[vimeo width=”300″ height=”220″]http://vimeo.com/17550989[/vimeo]

World leading authority in the field of creative thinking, the inventor of Lateral Thinking

Session:
Afternoon Master Class: ‘Creative thinking and leadership’ (November 16, 9.30am – 12.30pm)
Presentation:
‘Creative thinking and leadership – the only way forward’ (November 18, 3.40pm)

Edward de Bono is regarded as the global leading authority in the field of creative and conceptual thinking. An MD, PHD and Rhodes Scholar, he has authored 72 books in 41 languages. His instruction in thinking has been sought by major corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Shell, Prudential, GM, Ford, and Citicorp to name a few. His work is in use in thousands of schools worldwide, and mandatory on the curriculum in some countries.

He is the originator of the term ‘Lateral Thinking’ and the very popular “Six Thinking Hats” framework. Based on an understanding of how the brain works as a self-organising information system, Edward de Bono has designed specific thinking tools to maximize the creative process.

Highlights

• The New Deal UK program for unemployed youngsters introduced a 5 hour module into their curriculum, resulting in an employment increase of 500%.

[vimeo width=”300″ height=”220″]http://vimeo.com/17207094[/vimeo]

USA, World leading inventor and entrepreneur, Founder Singularity University

Session:
Deep Conversation: ‘Super-connected world – marvel or myth?’ (November 16, 6.30 – 9.00pm)
Presentation:
Exploiting the Emergent: Technology and the Future Date: (November 18, 11.00am)

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, established by the US Patent Office.

He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. Presidents.

Ray has written four national best selling books. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

See Ray featured in Time Magazine.

[youtube width=”300″ height=”220″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=555bsnvbAwA[/youtube]