Raymund Li has been leading the strategy and planning team for the EMEA re­gion at Uber since early 2017. He builds and drives business strategy to unlock a wide range of opportunities, in partnership with the broader leadership team. Prior to that, he was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company where he led multiple projects, primarily in the energy and natural resources space, on a broad set of operational, organisational, regulatory and innovation topics. Born and raised in the Philippines, he enjoys traveling and exploring the world, playing sports like tennis and spinning, and reading about political issues in the global arena.

Hamilton Mann is the group director of digital marketing and digital transforma­tion of Thales. In support of Thales’ digital transformation, he led the implemen­tation of group transverse digital initiatives and supported the execution of global business units digital transformation roadmaps to drive business innovation and growth (BIG) by making experimentation the norm. He also led digital transfor­mation in marketing to drive enhanced customer engagement and understanding while building a modern Thales’ marketing network. Prior to this appointment, he was director of Thales Consulting, the management consulting arm of Thales Group, working as advisor for Thales’ executives and focussing on business tech­nology, innovation, marketing, digital marketing, business globalisation strategy and organisational transformation. Before joining Thales, he was the director at Cap­gemini Consulting (now Capgemini Invent) working on digital transformation and information technology strategy assignments, and he co-founded his own con­sulting boutique, enjoying an entrepreneur experience for top-ranking companies in various sectors. His desire as Thales’ director of digital transformation and digital transformation in marketing is to involve the company’s 61,000 employees to accelerate Thales’ ability to explore new horizons for tomorrow’s growth and competitiveness by unleashing the collective genius across the group to make the impossible, “PoCible”.

Gerardo Mazzeo has a wealth of experience in commercial and marketing roles at Nestlé having spent over 20 years in the company. He has been leading the company’s global innovation activities since 2012, finding new and innovative ways to solve challenges across the business. Since 2016, he has also been lead­ing the HENRi@Nestlé open innovation initiative and from 2018 Nestlé’s digital acceleration team (DAT). By connecting Nestlé businesses with the best and brightest innovators and startups, the platform helps Nestlé to forge partnerships that can tackle the projects that matter; enhancing quality of life and contribut­ing to a healthier future.

Hayley Hughes was a design lead at Airbnb, facilitating the next evolution of Airbnb’s design language system (DLS). Previously, Hayley was the design lead for IBM’s design language. Based in San Francisco, Hayley’s work is showcased as one of “26 Innovations by 26 Innovative Women” and she is a certified enter­prise design thinking leader. Hayley helps companies create a sustainable culture of design by building programs, systems and frameworks that scale across the life span of an organisation.

Alain Bindels studied at Stanford University and is a trained agile coach (design thinking, scrum) with experience in human- and patient-centric design of health care and has been working more than 10 years at Roche in different roles.

He has extensive innovation management experience (setting up an innovation lab, innovation programs, open innovation, crowdsourcing, knowledge management, and innovation culture). He is also leading an innovation network at Roche to support the business to innovate and run innovation workshops to solve business challenges.

Alain is currently setting up an innovation and agility program to build new capabilities in the organization to support the organizational transformation. This program focusses on agile ways of working, including rapid prototyping and co-creation with customers. This program supports the company’s transformation to move the organization to a more self-organized organization.

He joined the adhesive technologies business unit of Henkel AG & Co. KGaA as corporate director of strategy and business development in December 2010. In April 2013, he became head of new business development, with responsibility for identifying and evaluating innovation opportunities through strategic fore­sight management, scouting, startup screening, venturing and incubation. In 1996 he joined Celanese Chemicals, where he worked in operations, new busi­ness development and then led a global R&D and new business development team, gained experience as area sales manager in the United States, and ran the Celanese emulsions textile and engineered fabrics business in Europe as well as their global glass fibre business. Paolo holds a PhD in chemical engineering from RWTH Aachen, Germany.

An industrial and systems engineer by training, Arianne Orillac earned her MBA between working across a range of industries, spanning logistics to pharmaceu­ticals. Passionate about tackling systemic, social and environmental challenges, she co-leads the circular economy portfolio for IDEO’s CoLab, collaborating with the textiles industry to explore opportunities to design out waste and create value through design.

Jos Tissen got involved in Unilever’s open innovation initiatives in 2006 when he was seconded to Unilever Technology Ventures in San Francisco to do technology scouting for healthy foods. He stayed in open innovation, initially focussing on scouting and gradually covering the whole range from contact to contract. His current job is ecosystems and open innovation manager, facilitating and acceler­ating OI for the foods and refreshment division. He is based in one of Unilever’s six major R&D locations in Vlaardingen, The Netherlands. Before joining the OI team he worked 11 years at Unilever R&D as a lead scientist in molecular infor­matics. Jos is married with two sons, is a passionate speed skater (and trainer) and has a PhD in chemistry.

Xavier Ormancey began his career in 1988 in the L’Oreal Group as a perfumer. In 1991, he joined Chanel Perfume & Beauty, where he successively held the positions of laboratory manager in the perfume creation studio on the Sophia- Antipolis Site in France. Then he was scientific spokesperson, director of supply chain sustainable development and director of the cosmetics research centre.

In 2011, he joined the Yves Rocher Group as the director of R&D, above an organisation of 170 employees. Since 2016, he was based at the Californian American Cosmetics Company, Counter Brands LLC as the director of product development. On September 3, 2018, he joined the Pierre Fabre Dermo-Cosmé­tique Company as the director of R&D.

Maher Chebbo is leading GE global digital energy solutions as senior executive SVP, chief business innovation officer, covering power generation, grids, storage, renewables and energy efficiency services. Before GE, Maher spent 21 years with SAP, where he had several local, regional and global leadership positions focus­sing on solution engineering, global field operations, software innovation and development through incubating new products (corporate in-venturing), industry business development, value engineering and general management. Besides his permanent role at GE, Maher is chairman of the GB of REEEP (as of 21st of April 2018), president of ESMIG, vice-chairman of ETIP SNET executive committee and chairman of its digital energy group. Maher is also a member of the scientific audit committee of TNO.

Dr. Benedikt Ahlers has a background in innovation management and has more than 20 years’ experience in the field of innovation management. Besides, he is the patentee of more than 30 patents. In his very early age, he led the innovation department of Bundesdruckerei GmbH, was senior manager at NEC Deutschland GmbH and was board member of IP Bewertungs AG. In 2009 he founded the Flo­renus AG and is managing partner there. Florenus supports companies in dealing with innovation, technology and intellectual property.

Jakob Fricke is director of platform business development, based in Berlin. He helps European portfolio companies with value-added services, facilitates col­laboration between Samsung and portfolio companies as well as helps portfolio companies expand to Europe. Jakob has always been working at the intersec­tion of technology and business, both as a founder (twice) as well as in various roles in Berlin-based startups across education, entertainment, publishing and e-commerce. His previous job was with Daimler pushing their digitisation efforts in marketing and sales.

Hicham Bougdal is a cloud program manager at Google, where he helps Google Cloud customers to innovate faster by adopting cloud technologies. Prior to that, he was leading the Google Apigee’s presales activities in the DACH region. Hi­cham has worked with customers across many industries and countries, this al­lowed him to have a good overview of the challenges companies are facing when it comes to adopting new technologies. Prior to joining Google, Hicham worked both in sales and software engineering roles. Last but not least, Hicham speaks five languages and he holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Telecom Bretagne (France).

Dr. Anju Brooker holds a PhD from Cambridge University in organometallic chem­istry and is a principal scientist at Procter & Gamble with 26 years’ experience. She has led product initiatives and technology development programmes of novel cleaning products for the global fabric and household care. Seen as one of the company’s key technical experts with a track record for managing large open in­novation collaborative partnership, Anju led a €3.4 million, 10-member FP-7 con­sortium programme as a project coordinator with universities, non-compete and multinational companies. She was also technical coordinator of a pan European €3.9 million Marie Curie ITN programme. In addition, she has extensive experi­ence in leading academic research projects, commercial innovation programmes with a range of large companies and SMEs. She’s a co-inventor on more than 25 granted patents and a number in the pipeline of which several inventions have been executed in the global market and over 20 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals. Seen as a thought leader in developing new innovations in application of nanotechnologies in cleaning products within P&G, she received the prestigious innovator John Smale Award. She currently holds a position of member on the UK’s Engineering & Physical Science Research Council Strategic Advisory Team and the Strategic Advisory Network for Circular Economy UK and is a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for Leeds University UK. She was formerly leader for the colloid and polymer science community of practice global network and co-leader of equality-diversity and inclusion network for European Procter & Gamble centres.

Dr. Armen Kherlopian serves as chief science officer at Genpact, a 90,000-plus person global professional services firm focussing on digital transformation. Dur­ing his career, Armen has provided high impact data science advisory for global Fortune 500 companies and government organisations such as NASA and the FDA. Previously at Booz Allen Hamilton he co-authored the Field Guide to Data Science, a widely used reference text for university students and industry prac­titioners alike, as well as co-founded the Data Science Bowl, which is the largest data challenge for social good. Armen is an awardee of the U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, U.S. Department of Energy Compu­tational Science Graduate Fellowship, and is a U.S. delegate to the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meetings. He holds a BS and MS in biomedical engineering with a focus on algorithms from Columbia University, a PhD in biophysics with a focus on machine learning from Cornell University, and completed a fellowship in AI at Princeton University.

Harry Behrens, head of the DFS blockchain factory, is a veteran blockchain evan­gelist. He has been actively involving himself in blockchain since 2012. In 2016, he co-founded the DFS blockchain swarm and initiated the development of the smartVIN® blockchain platform. Before starting his new position as “Mr. Block­chain” for DFS AG, he was head of IT for mobility and digital finance for DFS China. Harry has a master’s in computer science from the TU Muenchen, with a thesis on neural networks, and a PhD in information engineering from the University of Tokyo with a thesis on distributed AI. He speaks six languages flu­ently and is grappling with Mandarin Chinese. He enjoys learning languages and reading about history.

Vitaly Mzokov is Head of Innovation Hub at Kaspersky, responsible for developing and maintaining the innovations management process that fosters collaboration between the Company and brilliant minds and break-through projects inside and outside. Vitaly and his team are focused on identifying new trends and discovering new markets, scouting for best-in-class startups and technological alliances, and integrating them into Kaspersky business to create a win-win experience for everyone and convert it into efficient business models. 

Prior to this role, Vitaly was Head of Verification at Kaspersky’s Growth Center, where he participated in the development of new products and services of the company and was responsible for the business modeling and launching of several new projects that involve emerging technologies, like blockchain. 

Having joined Kaspersky in 2014 as Global Presales Manager, it took only one year for Vitaly to be promoted to Solution Business Lead. In that role, Vitaly was managing the Hybrid Cloud Security solution demonstrating 2-digit growth for the respective area of the business over 2.5 years.