Forum Speakers

Dr Chris Kutarna
Author ‘Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance’; Fellow, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford 

Christopher Kutarna is a two-time Governor General’s Medallist from Canada, and a Commonwealth Scholar. In 2006 Kutarna moved to Beijing, started a business, sold it, then paid himself for five years to do a doctorate in politics at Oxford and to write Age of Discovery. Prior to that, he spent time with the Boston Consulting Group in New Zealand and Australia. Kutarna’s open letters, posted weekly, are deemed required reading by some of the world’s smartest people and shape debate in media, boardrooms and classrooms around the world.

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Professor Teppo Felin
Professor of Strategy, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Teppo’s areas of expertise include strategy, entrepreneurship and innovation, complex systems and competitive advantage. His highly acclaimed and award-winning research has been published in top journals such as Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Industrial and Corporate Change, California Management Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He is also actively engaged in interdisciplinary research and has published this work in such journals as Erkenntnis, Arizona State Law Journal, Theory and Decision, and PLOS ONE. Teppo, who strongly encourages his students to interact with technology, has also received multiple MBA Outstanding Teacher of the Year Awards while teaching at the Marriott School, BYU. Before entering academia, Teppo worked in the venture capital industry in Munich, Germany and Amman, Jordan.

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John Maxwell Hobbs
Chairman/CEO, Delic.network; Managing Director/Founder, Vanguard Visions Limited 

Media consultant, internet pioneer, and BBC Scotland’s former Head of Technology, John Maxwell Hobbs has worked at the intersection of art and technology for over 20 years. He has recently conceived and developed BBC Music’s initiative with PRS Foundation and BASCA to foster, promote, and commission new British songwriters. Joining the BBC in 2006 to launch BBC Scotland’s 21st Century broadcasting facility, Pacific Quay, he oversaw PQ’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games coverage, and coverage of the Scottish Referendum. He launched BBC ALBA, Scotland’s Gaelic television channel, and developed the BBC’s first fully tapeless, HD workflow. He has extensive experience in communicating complex technological ideas to the general public through digital media, as well as guiding the development of cutting-edge internet applications and mobile application strategy and development, and is in demand as a speaker on media and technology topics.

Mike Lawton
Founder & CEO, Oxford Space Systems

Mike Lawton founded Oxford Space Systems (OSS), an early stage space technology business focused on delayable antennas and structures made from the company’s proprietary materials in September 2013. OSS subsequently secured significant venture capital backing in early 2014 and successfully completed an over-subscribed second round in 2015.
Mike holds a Degree in Electronics and has spent his career building and leading teams developing cutting edge, high technology. Oxford Space Systems is Mike’s third technology business, having previously started and exited two business. 

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Sam Conniff Allende
Serial social entrepreneur; Co-founder and former CEO of Livity, Don’t Panic and Live Magazine

Sam Conniff Allende is a multi-award winning serial social entrepreneur, and co-founder and former CEO of Livity, Don’t Panic and Live Magazine. Since starting his entrepreneurial career aged 19, Sam has mentored thousands of talented young entrepreneurs and hustlers around the world. He is an acclaimed public speaker, an advocate of ‘business as unusual’ or corporate responsibility and accountability, and a purpose-driven strategy consultant to brands such as Roald Dahl, Red Bull, Unilever and PlayStation.

Baroness McGregor-Smith CBE
Vice-chair, The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence (APPG AI)

Baroness McGregor-Smith joined the Department for Education as a non-executive board member in December 2015.She was formerly the Chief Executive of the Mitie Group, a strategic outsourcing company, and was the first Asian woman to be appointed to such a role in the FTSE 250 or FTSE 100. Baroness McGregor-Smith has also been the chair of the Women’s Business Council and a non-executive board member at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.She received a CBE for services to business and diversity in business in 2012 and was a created a life peer in 2015.

Professor Sue Dopson
Rhodes Trust Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Sue Dopson is the Academic Director of the Oxford Diploma in Organisational Leadership, a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is a noted specialist on the personal and organisational dimensions of leadership and transformational change.
Sue’s research centres on transformational change and knowledge exchange in the public and healthcare sectors. She has written and edited many major works on this topic and her research has informed and influenced government bodies such as the Department of Health and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in their thinking on areas such as the dissemination of clinical evidence into practice, medical leadership and the role of the support worker in the NHS.

Dr Bījna K Dasanī
Head of Architecture and Innovation, Lloyds Banking Group; Presenter, Women in Business show, StartupV TV; CIONET and IQPC Exchange Advisory Board member

Bijna has a robust track record of delivering strategic, innovation and complex transformation successes for global Financial Services firms, across products, asset classes and markets. She serves the Boards of CIO Net, the IPQC CDO Exchange Series, and the Inclusive Companies Network. A FinTech Mentor, she films videos on Mentorship, Leadership & Technology and a co-presenter for the Women in Business TV series. She advises and advocates for a diversified portfolio of Business, Data & Technology, Social Impact, I&D causes. She has spoken to global audiences at Millennial Board, Deloitte, Edinburgh DataFest, Amazon, Sky, IPQC CDO Exchange, Lloyds Banking Group, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, De Montfort University, Appway, CIO NEXT, Bloomberg and others.

Dr Henning Meyer
Managing Director, New Global Strategy; Editor-in-Chief, Social Europe

Dr Meyer works at the intersection of research, consultancy and publishing and the issues he deals with cut across politics, economics and business. He is Managing Director of New Global Strategy Ltd. and Editor-in-Chief of Social Europe, a leading digital media publisher. Furthermore, he is a Research Associate of the Public Policy Group at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University’s Centre for Business Research. Previously, he was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Policy Fellow at Harvard University, Senior Visiting Fellow at LSE and a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University.

Floyd Woodrow
Co-Founder, DIVISION Training

Floyd has an excellent track record of success as a Military Leader, Director, Non-Executive Director, Consultant and Negotiator.  He was one of the youngest soldiers ever to be selected for the UK's elite Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) at the age of 22.  He has served in many different operational areas globally, and was awarded the UK's second-highest award for gallantry, the Distinguished Conduct Medal, for his services whilst in Iraq and an MBE for his work in Afghanistan. He develops elite teams and individuals as well as offering practical and commercial value in strategic planning and execution and has developed an international reputation for designing and running leadership and elite performance training in sports, business, government, police, not for profit organisations and education.

Mark Preston
Team Principal at TECHEETAH Formula E Racing Team; Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, StreetDrone

After a career in Formula One in teams such as McLaren and Arrows Grand Prix, Mark moved into Formula E which is the culmination of a strategy focussed on how mega-trends come together to create a new vision for future mobility, namely lightweighting, electrification, collaborative consumption in the near future adding an autonomy layer which will result in autonomous race cars: Roborace. After starting a Formula One Team, Super Aguri, in 100 days (and now in Formula E), his career has recently focussed on industries that are seeing disruptive change through a number of start-ups in carbon fibre composites, tidal energy turbines and electric motor technologies.