Announcing the Speaker Lineup for The New Innovators' Summit

Face it, 2020 has been a big wake-up call (and punch in the gut). You need new skill sets, new business models, and a new network to navigate the new realities of today's pace of change. We've assembled an incredible lineup of speakers for IO2020 to help you do that. 

We've always prided ourselves on curating a fantastic cast of keynotes and interactive sessions for our InsideOutside.io events. This year is no different. Our first batch of speakers includes founders, authors, investors, and folks who've worked on innovation at Intuit, Estee Lauder, Dolby Labs, Google, Bayer, Capital One, Slack, Toyota, and more. We're also be curating a variety of Open Discussion sessions to bring attendees into the conversation.

Here's a sneak peek of our initial speaker lineup (We'll be adding more in the days to come so check the IO2020 event site for more updates).

Barry O'Reilly

Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and co-author of the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—included in the Eric Ries series, and a Harvard Business Review must-read for CEOs and business leaders. He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer, and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review.

Xiaoyin Qu

Xiaoyin is the founder of Run The World, an online events platform that empowers social gatherings. Xiaoyin was at Facebook and Instagram and was a Stanford MBA student before raising venture capital and launching Run The World. You can read more about her journey in her blog post "My journey of (possibly) predicting COVID, finding the "perfect" startup idea, and raising $15 million."

Dan Toma

Dan Toma is an innovation thought leader and the award-winning author of The Corporate Startup. Dan started his career in entrepreneurship, being involved with technology startups across the world. He focuses on enterprise innovation strategy - specifically on the changes blue-chip organizations need to make to allow for new ventures to be built in a corporate setting. In this capacity, he has worked with companies like Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Bayer, John Deere, and Allianz. 

Steph Smith

Steph is Head of Trends, Product Manager at The Hustle. She has been working remotely for over four years, as a growth marketer, writer, and indie maker. She spent three years at Toptal (most recently leading their Publications team), and is now the Head of Trends at the Hustle, working on their new product, Trends. She’s a big advocate for remote work and actively writes about it over at her blog, which has been read by over 450k people since launch last January. She is also a self-taught developer and has built multiple projects, some of which have gone to #1 on Product Hunt, won awards for inclusion, and led her to being nominated for Maker of the Year in 2018.

Doc Williams

Doc Williams is a brand developer, founder of Brand Factory, and maker of Build With Me. Doc is a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur, who has worked with everyone from ESPN to AppSumo. As an alumnus of Gary Vaynerchuk’s 4Ds group, Doc has seen firsthand the potential of small business owners and entrepreneurs… and how sometimes they need a push to get started. He created Build With Me to share new tools, inspire folks to create, and show how easy it can be to do what you love. Check out his intro video on YouTube.

Neil Soni

Neil Soni has built and created new ventures throughout his career, both as an entrepreneur and within Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business. His consulting practice builds innovation ecosystems for large companies and coaches startups on growth, sales, and traction. To learn more, visit his website or follow him on Twitter.

Eric Budin

Eric Budin is Managing Director at Touchdown Ventures in the Philadelphia office. Eric is responsible for managing multiple funds and runs Touchdown’s analyst program. He spent the previous 13 years as an executive at Comcast and Liberty Global. At both companies, his focus was on innovation and new business opportunities. At Comcast, he was VP of Business Development and helped launch Xfinity Home. He also led the company’s efforts in the SVOD, advertising, and video conferencing spaces and worked closely with Comcast Ventures to identify and invest in VC backed partners. While living in Amsterdam, he was Liberty Global’s VP of Product Strategy and Incubation and helped launch their advanced advertising business. Prior to Comcast, Eric worked in Silicon Valley for venture-backed companies, including more.com which he co-founded.

Carol Tran

Carol Tran is Head of Growth at Dolby Laboratories, a three-time entrepreneur, philanthropist, and change agent for suboptimal business conditions. She partners with company leadership, acting as a guide to reveal inefficiencies and grow the business using limited resources. Her growth hacking combines tactics and theory, examining the business holistically. She uses historical data to build a growth engine, using repeatable, scalable processes to understand user behavior, translate findings with product visionaries, and implement marketing automation to find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. She has worked and consulted with a wide range of companies across several industries—providing her the leverage to be industry agnostic and doing what is necessary to grow customers and revenue. To learn more about hacks and tips on growth hacking, you can connect with her at www.caroltran.com.

Vaughn Tan

Vaughn is a London-based strategy consultant, author, and professor. He specializes in designing organizations that are resilient to and benefit from uncertainty. He has spent over a decade working with the food and beverage industry and is also active in legal technology, structured data, and regenerative agriculture. Vaughn's new book, The Uncertainty Mindset, is about how uncertainty can be used to drive innovation and adaptability. It’s based on years of research with some of the world’s most innovative culinary R&D teams. Since 2013, Vaughn has been an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management.

Regine Gilbert 

Regine Gilbert is a user experience designer, educator, and international public speaker with over 10 years of experience working in the technology arena. She has a strong belief in making the world a more accessible place—one that starts and ends with the user. In 2019, Regine’s first book, Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind (Design Thinking) was released through Apress publishing.

Temirlan Nugmanov

Tem is the founder of Optemization, a no-code productivity consultancy where he helps busy executives build organization systems and habits to free up more time and focus on getting important sh*t done. He has spent time working with TechStars and NYU Entrepreneurial Institute.

Hugh Molotsi 

Hugh Molotsi is the founder and CEO of Ujama, a messaging platform for communities to connect, communicate, and collaborate. Hugh also advises and invests in startups and is the co-author of The Intrapreneur’s Journey, a book on how to develop a culture of innovation at large companies. In 2015, Hugh concluded a 22-year career at Intuit where his last position was Engineering Fellow and Vice President of Innovation. During his Intuit tenure, Hugh worked on QuickBooks and several other small business offerings. Hugh has been a serial innovator and helped launch several new businesses at Intuit including Intuit Payments. Hugh is passionate about grassroots innovation and “giving voice to good ideas” wherever those ideas may come from.

Karen Holst

Karen Holst, Co-Author of Start Within, is an entrepreneur turned intrapreneur. She co-founded educational technology startup MyEdu, formerly Pick-A-Prof (acquired by Blackboard), and transitioned to intrapreneurial roles within the California Department of Education, IDEO, Autodesk, and LinkedIn Learning. From government agencies and non-profits to startups and Fortune 500 companies, Karen has worked with organizations of varying sizes and across industries to help their leadership unlock creative potential and empower their employees to innovate. Her expertise on innovation has been featured in TechCrunch, The New York Times, NPR, The Chicago Tribute, CNN, and more. Karen currently teaches courses through LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com), serves on the board of Thrive Education, and mentors entrepreneurs through TechStars and Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Leaders Program. 

Rika Nakazawa

Rika Nakazawa is a senior leader, entrepreneur, investor, and frequent public speaker on technology-powered business transformation. She is the CEO and Founder of BoardSeatMeet, Inc. a Silicon Valley, social impact venture, focusing on diversifying the board room by empowering women to build and leverage social capital with modern technology, ultimately to deliver “High-Performance Board Room of Tomorrow”. She is also Vice President and Client Partner at Conduent, a $4B revenue global BPO provider to Fortune 100 companies. Trilingual in Japanese, German, and English, Rika grew up in Japan and moved to the US initially to attend Princeton University. Rika has since worked internationally over two decades in senior executive roles in strategy, business development, and marketing with Fortune 500 companies - NVIDIA, Sony, Accenture, American Express - and Silicon Valley startups. She is a technology industry veteran and has served on multiple venture boards in next-generation computing and artificial intelligence ecosystems. Throughout her career, Rika has been an avid advocate for advancing women's leadership in governance, technology, and business across industry verticals and global dimensions. She has also been actively engaged in U.S-Japan business collaboration and progress and is an ambassador to fabbit and Council Leader with the U.S Japan Council.

Brant Cooper

Brant is the co-founder and CEO of Moves The Needle, which has advised the innovation practices of such leading companies as Qualcomm, Intuit, Capital One, Pitney Bowes and 7-11. Brant helps organizations big and small create value. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets, is a thought-leader in corporate innovation and is a sought-after keynote speaker, advisor, and mentor.

Sean Ammirati

Sean Ammirati is a Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. In addition to teaching, he is also the Co-Founder and Director of the Carnegie Mellon Corporate Startup Lab (CSL). The CSL is a Swartz Center initiative that has conducted research and developed tools to help companies better adapt and integrate entrepreneurial best practices into their own innovation processes. In addition to his work at CMU, Sean is also a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and author. He recently completed his first book The Science of Growth. Finally, Sean is also the host of one of the most popular podcasts on corporate innovation - Agile Giants which you can find on your favorite podcasting platform.

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In addition to the speaker sessions, you'll get a chance to explore the Get Started Showcase & Pitch Competition, highlighting some of the best startups and innovative projects, and mix with best and brightest in the world of innovation and entrepreneurship.

If you need to accelerate your learning about new trends and tools for innovation, discuss talent, technology, and transformation, or remix your network, join us on October 20-22, 2020, at IO2020 The New Innovators' Summit.

I hope you can make it! Grab a spot today!