Featured speakers
The following speakers have been confirmed.
Applications are Now Open Until July 15th
Michael Winter
Dr. Michael Winter is the Chief Scientist at RTX, the largest Aerospace and defense company, (merger of Raytheon Company and United Technologies Corporation) where he shapes the company’s cross-enterprise technology strategy and accelerates innovation across aerospace and defense.
What 45 years taught me about doing it wrong
His father told him early: machines don’t break, parts break. It took 45 years to understand what that really meant. Chief Scientific Officer at RTX, Michael Winter draws on aerospace, medicine, and the leadership of large organizations to make one unsettling case: the most common failure in innovation isn’t bad science or lack of resources. It’s smart people asking questions that are too small. He shows why the breakthrough is never the end of the story, and why the question that separates great innovators from brilliant failures is not “did we solve it?” but “did we solve the right thing?
BIO
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
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.
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.
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.
Wizdom Powell, PhD, MPH
Curiosity Is a Readiness Skill.
BIO
Jessica Sophia Sager
Co-Founder and CEO of All Our Kin | Trailblazing Innovator | Social Entrepreneur
What K-12 Education Can Learn From Child Care
We’ve spent decades trying to make child care more like school. But what if we’ve had it exactly backwards?
As AI transforms how we work, climate change reshapes the challenges we face, and knowledge becomes instantly accessible, success will depend less on what students know than on how they learn. The capacities that will matter most—creative thinking, resilience, adaptability, empathy, and curiosity—are the very ones early childhood educators cultivate every day. If we want to prepare children for success, then instead of making child care more like school, it’s time to make school more like child care.
