Adrian Chernoff, BSME, MBA, MEME, is a forward-thinking product visionary and an award- winning inventor who helps companies create what’s next. Over the past 20 years he has led innovation and technology at the forefront of industry for the world’s largest companies as an expert on innovation, a developer of new products and platforms, and by making the impossible possible. A recipient of 90 patents and 25 awards including Time Magazine’s “Coolest Invention of the Year” and Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New,” he invented the first electric vehicle skateboard platform at General Motors, concepted the first tele- operated medical robot at NASA, launched the best printer of the year at Kodak, designed theme park rides as an Imagineer at Disney, created an office product for Staples, built the first software-as-a-service customer experience platform for investor communications at Broadridge Financial Services, and delivered the No. 1 downloaded mobile app for patients with diabetes and deployed millions of IoT medical devices at Johnson & Johnson. Drawing upon a rich background of experiences across disciplines of engineering, design, finance and marketing, and spanning healthcare, transportation, financial services, entertainment and consumer packaged goods, he has led first-of-their-kind global programs to create, strategies, design, develop and deliver breakthrough products, technologies and customer experiences. Currently at Ideation Genesis as a consulting partner, Adrian works with companies as a collaborative extension on their most pressing challenges to strategies, design and deliver new products, programs and initiatives.

Gerhard Pfau is an IBM distinguished designer leading enterprise design thinking in Europe. He works with IBM teams and with clients to help them understand, experience and leverage enterprise design thinking to create innovative solutions with outstanding user experience. Gerhard loves designing experiences for people and deeply understands technology. The latter made him become a leader of the IBM Academy. Gerhard led the team that created the studio in Boeblingen, Germany. As design lead for IBM Studios Boeblingen, he is mentoring and nurturing the local design community to ensure great outcomes for users. Prior to that, Gerhard was design lead in IBM’s smarter process portfolio, and lead architect for human-centric business process management.

Anish Joshi is head of design and innovation for Shell, where he is creating, from the ground up, a new worldwide innovation lab capability that sets out to develop products and services through design, lean innovation and agile methodologies, coupled with new technologies. To address opportunities across the business and solve wicked problems, he champions a holistic human-centred proposition from design thinking and service design, through to digital creation (UX and UI). Anish helps set the direction, leads teams of designers and analysts and shapes strategic, physical, visual and digital work to push beyond current trends into truly future focused innovation and invention. Anish has previously worked for a variety of clients and consultancies on a diverse range of projects; from developing the product and brand for a new Google payment venture, teaching 3D design in the Bay Area and living and working in the Bahamas developing the creative and brand for the Sandals luxury resort chain. He has also designed user-centric digital platforms and services for a range of financial services companies (Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Bankinter, Aviva), telecoms providers (Vodafone), pharmaceutical companies (Roche, UCB), publishers (Financial Times) and international governments (the Saudi Arabian departments of labor and health) through his time at EY-Seren and Deloitte. Anish has an Executive MBA from Imperial College London, where he also explored how strategic design can combine with business in original ways.

Over the last 16 years, Toby Haug has gathered international experience in a broad variety of fields, including zoology, consulting, software design and management. As head of the humanising business initiative, he currently leads a highly-networked initiative within SAP, a global enterprise software company, with the purpose of amplifying the human aspects of business and turning culture into a competitive attractor. He is also a passionate evangelist of modern management principles, which place a high value on adaptive teams, self-driven organic structures, strategic improvisation and creative flexibility.

Anet Redmer’s career purpose is centred around effective innovation of new products and services, so that they will be fully embraced by their users whilst creating long-term value for the business. Originally a trained architect and product designer, Anet hails from Europe and the US, where she worked with international innovation platforms to create cross-industry pollinated future-visionary experiences, featured by BBC and Discovery Channel. In Australia, Anet has successfully worked with startups as well as large organisations such as Qantas Airways, AMP, Telstra and the federal government. As part of AMP’s former service design team, she won two prestigious Good Design Awards last year for the team’s service design achievements. Anet currently works for Qantas Airways to set up and scale service design and human-centered design across Qantas Group.

In her professional journey, Anat Treanor has been focussing on the connection be- tween psychology and design, inventing creative solutions for human needs. During her career, Anat has worked at various London-based design agencies and startups. Anat specialises in design that is bridging the physical and digital worlds, examples found in exhibitions, displays, gaming and teaching tools. Currently, Anat is UX lead at Ocado Technology, building the Ocado Smart Platform - an international innovative product guiding grocery retailers to the future. With her team she develops world-leading user experience for fast-paced automated fulfilment centres.

Alexander Krivobokov incubates innovative projects at Schneider Electric, actively using principles of design thinking to develop and test new products and services. Prior to that, he held a variety of positions in strategy, marketing and business development at Schnei- der Electric, American Power Conversion, Lucent Technologies and Siemens.

Dr. Bettina Maisch is a distinguished practitioner as well as lecturer. She works as a senior key expert for industrial design thinking at Siemens Corporate Technology Munich and is teaching design thinking at the University of St. Gallen as well as at the Universities of Applied Science in Ingolstadt and Munich. Bettina has a PhD in business innovation from the University of St. Gallen. She was visiting scholar at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University as well as at the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley.

Alexander Grots is an independent innovation specialist with 19 years of experience in practical application and teaching of the design thinking innovation method. He has been the founder and managing director of Bashiru and gravity-Europe, and is a partner at touchideas. (Poland), WIR Innovation (Spain) and Sonder Consulting (Ecuador), all design and innovation consultancies dedicated to the human-centred innovation approach. Before starting his own adventure, Alexander was associate partner of IDEO Inc. in Palo Alto, California, and managing director of IDEO’s operations in Germany. In this role he also started the School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, Germany, and ran many other university classes on the topic ever since. In the past few years he started a few other companies, one of which is ProGlove, a smart device for industrial IoT.

Angelika Hug has an MA in general history and German studies from the University of Zu- rich. She started in 2014 at Generali as a strategic assistant of the chief HR officer involved in various international HR projects. Responsible for talent management and the graduate program at Generali in 2015 and 2016. Since the beginning of 2017, she’s been the head of human capital management and responsible for employer branding, talent attraction, employee engagement, and employee and leadership development. Some additional cool stuff: she got a master’s in HR management in 2018, participated in the first design think- ing sprint and is a strong ambassador of the method throughout the company. Angelika is responsible for the selection process of the corporate startup LINGS, its fan No. 1 and their unofficial HR business partner.

Mike Pinder is a senior innovation consultant at Board of Innovation, helping global Fortune 500 companies to innovate like startups from innovation strategy to design thinking, lean startup and business model innovation to create intrapreneurial troublemakers. He has 10- plus years’ experience guiding executives and project teams, cross-industry in B2B/B2C for clients like GE, ABInBev, ATOS, Zeppelin Foundation, Logitech, ING, Bpost and many others.

Siobhan Hennessy heads up customer experience for Musgrave, Ireland’s leading grocery supermarket and convenience brands – SuperValu and Centra. Prior to this she held roles in Bank of Ireland, eir, Vodafone and AOL, where she led CX strategy and transformation programmes, oftentimes from greenfield sites. Her CX roles over the last 15 years have encompassed the areas of CX strategy and governance, voice of the customer, journey mapping, CX analytics and CX culture and design. Her focus in the last six years has been leaning more towards transforming the CX culture of the business through the use of ser- vice design and design thinking. Prior to her CX roles, Siobhan led commercial marketing functions in telcos, freight, food manufacturing, publishing and educational services in a wide variety of companies in Ireland, France, Spain and Chile.

In his current role, Pieter Musters is responsible for bringing in the voice of the consumer in the innovation projects for Philips’ coffee businesses. His product research team drives the translation of powerful insights into products that delight consumers better than com- petition and live up to Philips’ brand promise. The influence of his team spans from insight generation/concept development to market launch and forms a link between R&D and the business. Human-centred design thinking is at the heart of the innovation processes of Philips. To this end, the product research teams initiate consumer confrontations and collect consumer market data to steer the organisation effectively. Pieter started his career at Unilever in data science and moved gradually into the domain of sensory and consumer research. At Unilever he learnt the power of combining qualitative insights with solid numbers, and for more than 20 years he has been working on the interface between R&D and marketing. He combines a background in engineering with a solid understanding of consumer psychology to guide innovation projects.

As head of the user experience department and agile coach at Bosch Power Tools, Daniel Friedmann is responsible for the successful implementation of agile working methods in the professional power tools business unit to foster a more user-centric and agile working style in the organisation. Prior to this, Daniel was business owner of an agile “intra-preneur” team at Bosch Power Tools that was piloting the holistic transformation process and setting a blueprint for a successful implementation of agile methods in hardware development. Daniel started his career in a management consultancy. After joining Bosch, he pursued a variety of operational and strategic roles in the area of marketing and sales, business development as well as agile product and service development.

As a design thinking coach, Uli Witte is responsible for supporting teams at Bosch Power Tools to develop innovative products, services and business models for an increasingly fast-moving, more agile and digital world. Prior to that, Uli worked as an engineer in mo- tor development for Bosch Power Tools. His responsibilities included specification, design, testing and project work in motor development. Uli started his career as an engineer in the automotive industry and worked for well-known car brands.

As industrial designer at Bosch Power Tools, Adrian Karcher is responsible for the success- ful implementation of a more user-centric industrial design approach in the organisation. He focusses on incorporating a creative mindset in the product development process and enriching project teams with several design skills like visualisation techniques.

In previous experiences as product designer, Feyyaz Cakir gained the ability to combine the interaction of function, construction and technology with form, aesthetics and material. As design thinking coach, he expanded his abilities to integrate sociology, economics and business development into design processes in order to find the highest possible value add for the user and all relevant stakeholders. At Bosch Power Tools he is responsible for supporting various teams in product and service development. Problems are identified on a basis of methodical approaches in order to design new solutions with creative methods.