GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON INNOVATION & AGILITY
Innovation World Tour
• Wednesday 24 May, 2023
• 08:00-17:30
• Up Close & Virtual - on Zoom
Innovation World Tour
Wednesday 24 MAY, 2023
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON INNOVATION & AGILITY
Before the pandemic, AI and disruptive technology were the most powerful force for change in the world, including in the world of work. Due to the pandemic, the power and the speed of this ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ has intensified creating and enabling seismic shifts in how we live and work and in how businesses, organisations and institutions operate.
Things will not go back to how they were before.
To explore this theme, across one incredible day we will meet and heard from some of the world’s most innovative companies:
The Great Tech Revolution: Insights from China
24 May 2023 – 08:00-11:30
China is the largest digital economy in the world with more than 900 million internet users.
User demand is constantly driving innovation and new digital business models to the next level. No matter if you find it fascinating or scary, you need to understand the dynamics of the new digital world order.
Christina Boutrup
Leading China Analyst and Journalist
Christina has her finger on the pulse of what’s happening in China. As the world’s largest, most sophisticated digital economy which accounts for 50% of all global e-commerce trade, China offers invaluable insights into how to thrive in a digital world at a time when every organisation is trying to figure out how to deal with the post-pandemic acceleration to digital.
As a journalist Christina travelled in most parts of The Middle Kingdom and covered areas such as business economy, environment and social issues for more than a decade, hosting radio and TV shows about China.
Christina interviewed Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma and has closely followed the global expansion of Chinese companies. She has written several books about business in China, most recently The Great Tech Revolution: How China is Shaping Our Future.
Christina is the newly-appointed China Correspondent for Danish TV2 and will be our guest moderator for the China section of the day. She is also on the Advisory Board of ThinkChina.dk, a think tank of the University of Copenhagen.
Alvin Tse
VP, Xiaomi Global
Xiaomi Corporation is a Chinese multinational electronics company founded in April 2010 in Beijing. Xiaomi is the third-largest seller of smartphones worldwide, with a market share of about 12%, and second largest smartphone maker in the world. At the beginning of 2021, Xiaomi was a leading brand in 12 countries. By August 2021, it was among the top five smartphone vendors in 47 markets around the world.
Xiaomi is also a major manufacturer of appliances including televisions, flashlights, unmanned aerial vehicles, and air purifiers using its Internet of Things and Xiaomi Smart Home product ecosystems. Xiaomi’s range of consumer electronics, including a smart home (IoT) product ecosystem, can connect to more than 100 million smart devices and appliances.
In 2021, Xiaomi acquired the tech startup Deepmotion which develops mapping technology for autonomous vehicles.
Alvin is a Xiaomi global founding team member, POCO founding member, and former general manager of Xiaomi Indonesia, with over a decade of operational and investing experiences across their four largest internet markets: China, India, Indonesia and the United States. He was recognised by Xiaomi as one of the Top 100 Achievers during company’s 10 year anniversary.
Before Xiaomi, Alvin setup and led Flipboard China after a stint as Entrepreneur in Residence at StartX.
Alvin graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Management Science and Engineering. While at Stanford, he was Co-President of BASES, the world’s largest entrepreneurship student group, and Co-Founder of CEO (Chinese Entrepreneurs Organisation), which has since become the premier business network for Stanford’s Chinese entrepreneurs.
Richard Turrin
Industry Leader on Fintech & Digital Innovation
Richard is an award-winning executive and previously headed fintech teams at IBM following a dynamic career in investment banking. Richard is the international best-selling author of Innovation Lab Excellence and Cashless – China’s Digital Currency Revolution.
Richard headed fintech for IBM Cognitive Studios Singapore (IBM’s Innovation Lab) where he led a team that built innovative AI and analytic solutions. He also worked in IBM China where he led his team to win the prestigious Risk Technology Product of the Year award for his unique hybrid-cloud solution to risk analytics.
Richard was a banker for almost 20 years and a serial innovator throughout his career. Specializing in the design and innovation of new fixed-income products, he saw firsthand how technology, finance, and regulation come together to impact innovation. He made his career by thinking ‘out of the box’ and uses his experience now as a consultant to put fintech and AI to work for his clients.
As an experienced finance professional and systems builder, Richard understands what financial services companies need in order to thrive and how non-financial companies can benefit from advances in Fintech.
Peter Lisbygd
CEO, China Experience
China is driving a Green Mobility Revolution with strong global impact for consumers, suppliers, and the established car industry. In fact China is already dominating this space in terms of speed, innovation, and supply chain.
Peter has an incredibly in-depth understanding of China, having spent 16 years in China and now based in Shanghai. In recent years Peter has a special focus on the country’s explosive development within technology, new digital business models and China ́s green transformation.
Peter shares the latest insights on what is going on, who are the key players, and how will it impact the rest of the world.
Africa: The Informal Economy
By 2030, the number of people under the age of 30 living in Africa will exceed 1 billion and represent 65% of the continent’s population.
In Kenya, nearly a million young people enter the labour market every year: sometimes straight from school, sometimes with a hard-won college degree in hand. But right now, less than 10% of young people ever have the opportunity to secure full-time formal employment.
For most young Kenyans, self-employment and entrepreneurship in the informal sector is their only option for securing income and a livelihood. Across Kenya today, there are an estimated 3 million young people running their own businesses, that’s 31% of 15-24-year-olds.
Kenya’s young micro-entrepreneurs earn double the normal income for their age group, adding some $290m a month to their local economies. And, according to the 2019 national survey, 29% of micro-entrepreneurs create work opportunities for one or more people in their neighbourhoods.
Rob Burnet, Founder & Chief Executive, Shujaaz Inc. and Anuj Tanna, CEO and Co-Founder, MESH
Shujaaz Inc. is a network of social ventures based in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Shujaaz uses AI, insight and data – gleaned from their network of 7.5 million 15-24-year-olds across East Africa – and multi-platform media to create social and economic value for millions of young people, as well as their corporate and development-focused clients.
Shujaaz’s team of 60 young East African researchers, creatives, strategists and producers design and run their network of social ventures:
The MESH is built on a decade of data and community engagement. This digital networking venture is designed to harness the power of AI and big data to unlock value for Africa’s informal sector micro-entrepreneurs. It is the first online community for entrepreneurs in the informal economy.
The HustlaMBA is a digital and real-world learning community designed to up-skill thousands of young ‘Hustlas’ working in the informal sector.
Shujaaz is East Africa’s biggest youth brand and it sits at the heart of the business. Today, multi-platform Shujaaz has 7.3 million comic book readers, 4.4 million social media followers and receives over 60,000 SMS messages every month. Reaching 56% of young Kenyans and 24% of young Tanzanians, Shujaaz is East Africa’s biggest youth brand and it sits at the heart of the business.
Together, Shujaaz and their corporate and NGO partners have driven tangible, data-focused impact and change.
Rob is a two-times Emmy Award winning media producer based in Nairobi. He arrived in Kenya from Scotland by mistake 30 years ago.
Before founding Shujaaz Inc. (formerly Well Told Story) in 2009, Rob worked on large-scale public-interest TV, made grants for the Ford Foundation, and set up the Kenyan visual arts studios, Kuona Trust. He also worked as a professional musician.
Inside Silicon Valley
For over five decades, Silicon Valley has been a by-word for innovation and great place to work culture.
It’s home to the densest concentration of tech companies in the world, where household names rub shoulders with startups. Despite Covid, the digital natives from Silicon Valley have continued to innovate and thrive.
Danny Fortson
West Coast Correspondent, The Sunday Times
Danny has been the West Coast correspondent for The Sunday Times since the beginning of 2017, covering all things technology and Silicon Valley. He was previously City Editor for the paper.
Danny grew up in the USA, lived and worked as a journalist in Europe (predominantly London) for 15 years, writing about natural resources – mining, energy and oil – before returning to California.
Danny also hosts the weekly Danny in the Valley podcast, meeting the new wave of tech entrepreneurs hoping to disrupt our lives
Dr Danny Lange
SVP AI & Machine Learning, Unity Tech; former Head of Machine Learning, Uber; & former GM, Amazon Machine Learning
From ChatGPT to Deepfakes, barely a day goes by without a new story on the disruption AI and Machine Learning is bringing to all aspects of our lives – the possibilities appear endless. Dr Danny Lange has inhabited this world throughout his career from the early days in Silicon Valley with legendary General Magic Inc. and General Motors to Amazon Machine Learning and Uber.
Danny is now SVP AI & Machine Learning at Unity Tech, the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content where he leads efforts to advance the capabilities of AI through scalable game simulations. Creators, ranging from game developers to artists, architects, automotive designers, filmmakers, and others, use Unity to make their imaginations come to life. Unity is the foundation upon which the world’s most powerful digital content is created.
In the fourth quarter of 2021, Unity had, on average, 3.9 billion monthly active end users who consumed content created or operated with its solutions. The applications developed by these creators were downloaded, on average, five billion times per month in 2021.
Danny was Head of Machine Learning at Uber where he led an effort to build the world’s most versatile Machine Learning platform to support all parts of Uber’s business from the Uber App to self-driving cars.
Previously, Danny was the General Manager of Amazon Machine Learning – an AWS product that offers Machine Learning as a Cloud Service – and Principal Development Manager at Microsoft where he was leading a product team focused on large-scale Machine Learning for Big Data.
Danny spent eight years on Speech Recognition Systems, first as CTO at legendary General Magic Inc, then through his work on General Motors OnStar Virtual Advisor, one of the largest deployments of an intelligent personal assistant until Siri, and as co-founder of his own company, Vocomo Software.
Danny started his career as a Computer Scientist at IBM Research and has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark.