Featured speakers
The following speakers have been confirmed.
Applications are Now Open Until June 1st
Warren Berger
Questionologist
"Every Breakthrough starts with a question"
How powerful questions actually lead to innovation. Einstein: “Give me an hour to solve a problem and I will spend 50 minutes framing the right question and a few minutes solving it.
BIO
Innovation expert and questionologist WARREN BERGER has studied hundreds of the world’s foremost innovators, entrepreneurs, and creative thinkers to learn how they ask questions, generate original ideas, and solve problems. He is the author or co-author of more than 12 books on innovation, including the bestseller A MORE BEAUTIFUL QUESTION: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas (now published by Bloomsbury in a 10th-anniversary edition with updated and expanded content) and the internationally acclaimed GLIMMER, named one of Businessweek’s Best Innovation and Design Books of the Year. His writing appears in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, and The New York Times. He lives in New York.
Simon Hill
CEO & Founder of Wazoku | Activating Human Intelligence | Building the systems that turn innovation into measurable value
Genius Doesn’t Scale: Why Experts Are Often the Wrong People to Solve Expert Problems
Drawing on breakthrough stories from global innovation challenges, Simon challenges the assumption that the best solutions come from the most recognized experts. What fails to scale is not intelligence, but perspective.
BIO
CEO & Founder of Wazoku | Activating Human Intelligence | Building the systems that turn innovation into measurable value
Carolyn Gregoire
Carolyn is a writer, researcher and creative collaborator whose work sits at the intersection of creativity, contemplative practice, and human potential.
The Creative Power of Contemplation
Somewhere between focused thought and empty rest lies our most creatively generative state of mind. The ability to inhabit this in-between state (what I like to call “threshold thinking”) is a cognitive skill possessed by great artists, thinkers and innovators—and one that’s been lost in a culture obsessed with optimization, productivity and AI. States of wakeful rest—mind-wandering, daydreaming, and deliberate contemplation—activate the brain’s Default Mode Network, allowing unconscious associations to flow freely. Here, insight arrives not by force but by invitation. This talk invites you to actively practice contemplation as a creative tool, and to protect the inner space from which true creativity emerges.
BIO
Carolyn is the co-author, with psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, of Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, an exploration of the inner lives of great artists and thinkers that has sold over 40,000 copies. She is the creator of the Webby Award-winning CREATIVE TYPES personality test, taken over 15 million times.
She was a senior writer for the Huffington Post and editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, her writing has appeared in publications including Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, TIME, Inc., Fast Company, and The New Republic.
She is a longtime contemplative practitioner who is fascinated by the relationship between inner life and creative work.
Robert Root-Bernstein
Robert Root-Bernstein is an Emeritus Professor of Physiology at Michigan State University and one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known as a “genius grant”).
Hybridizing: The Art of Winning a Nobel Prize
Studies of Nobel prizewinning scientists demonstrate that creative scientists are almost always polymaths, significantly more likely than average scientists to pursue arts and crafts. This passion helps build skills like observation, pattern recognition, and analogical thinking. However, art alone isn’t the secret ingredient. What truly drives breakthrough innovation is hybridizing any combination of fields to discover new possibilities at unexpected intersections.
BIO
Bob Root-Bernstein is an Emeritus Professor of Physiology at Michigan State University with degrees in Biochemistry and History of Science from Princeton University. A MacArthur Fellowship encouraged his multidisciplinary activities, especially research on scientific creativity and art-science interactions. He has written five books, 40 book chapters and 180 peer-reviewed papers. He is at work on two more books, one on artists and musicians as scientists and another on artists and musicians as inventors .He is himself an artist who has exhibited in individual and group shows and is on the editorial board of LEONARDO, an art-science journal.
Moshe Bar
Why Smart People Stop Having Original Ideas
BIO
Moshe is a cognitive neuroscientist at Bar-Ilan University and Massachusetts Hospital. He was previously the head of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University and before that director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. His research focuses on various aspects of brain function, including memory, foresight, mental load, mind-wandering, mood, and creativity. He has published over 90 research articles, edited two scientific books and published the popular science book Mindwandering.
His writing to the public has appeared in numerous platforms, including the New York Times and the WSJ.
