International Conference and Annual Meeting

Keynote I

Amy Webb, World-Renowned Futurist; Founder & CEO of the Future Today Institute 

Amy Webb advises CEOs of the world’s most-admired companies, three-star admirals and generals, and the senior leadership of central banks and intergovernmental organizations. Founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures, Amy pioneered a data-driven, technology-led foresight methodology that is now used within hundreds of organizations. She is a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she developed and teaches the MBA course on strategic foresight. She is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business, a Fellow in the United States-Japan Leadership Program and a Foresight Fellow in the U.S. Government Accountability Office Center for Strategic Foresight. She was elected a life member to the Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. She is a member of the World Economic Forum where she serves on the Global Future Council on Media, Entertainment and Culture and the Stewardship Board of the Forum's Platform for Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture. She was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research received a national Sigma Delta Chi award. She was also a Delegate on the former U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, where she worked on the future of technology, media and international diplomacy. She is the author of several popular books, including The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, which was longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, and won the 2020 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology, and The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, which won the Thinkers50 Radar Award, was selected as one of Fast Company’s Best Books of 2016, Amazon’s best books 2016, and was the recipient of the 2017 Gold Axiom Medal for the best book about business and technology. Webb was named by Forbes as one of the five women changing the world, listed as the BBC’s 100 Women of 2020, ranked on the Thinkers50 list of the 50 most influential management thinkers globally. Her latest book, The Genesis Machine, explores the futures of gene editing, biotech and synthetic biology.

Keynote II

Shawn Achor, author of Big Potential and The Happiness Advantage

Shawn Achor is the NYTimes bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage and Big Potential. Shawn graduated from Harvard and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics. After spending 12 years at Harvard, Shawn traveled to 50 countries studying how to create an interconnected approach to potential and happiness. He has now worked with over a third of the Fortune 100 companies, and at places like NASA, the NFL, and the Pentagon. Shawn has battle-tested his research in high challenge environments from working with all the public schools in Flint Michigan, to six battalions of Marines at Camp Pendleton, to government leaders at Camp David, to students in a shantytown in Soweto South Africa, to hospitals in the wake of a mass shooting in Orlando and the Boston bombing. Shawn’s research made the cover of Harvard Business Review, his TED talk is one of the most popular of all time with over 20 million views, and his lecture airing on PBS has been seen by millions.