A festival of innovation and thought leadership

Jeff Carter is the founder of the Center for Future Banking, a visionary research Center created in April of 2008 to explore the future of the Banking industry. He is currently CEO of Azigo, Inc, A cutting edge identity company based in Cambridge, MA. Azigo has a vision to allow people to take control of their virtual and physical presence and own their own information. Before Azigo and creating the Center, Jeff Carter led an effort for Bank of America examining the future strategy for leveraging the company’s vast information cloud, stores and platforms.

Prior to Bank of America he held executive roles in multiple venture backed startups with experience in an IPO and several liquidity events. Carter loves multi channel work; strategy, creation and implementation and what he refers to as “deal making.”
He has been recognized in numerous publications for his business and technical leadership, was the subject of a Harvard Business School case study in 2009, awarded Chief Technology Officer of the month by InfoWorld in 2002, 40 Under 40 Innovator Award in 2004, and a nomination for the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Carter advises several companies around the world including the Hoyos Group, an Iris scan pioneer also heavily invested in the identity space, Zenmonics, a financial services transformation company, Micronotes, an online bill pay disruptor and engagements with the Federal Reserve of Boston.

He is involved in a variety of community service programs including the Arts and Science Council, Habitat for Humanity and the United Way.
He is a prolific reader and has also co-authored with Donald Krause the book No Limit -The Texas Hold’Em Guide to Winning in Business offering practical advice for outmaneuvering opponents and achieving success, and applying tactics for winning from Texas Hold ‘em poker to every competitive arena.

In addition to teaching and practicing surgery in Seattle, Richard Satava is Senior Science Advisor at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. Born in Florida and drafted into the military, he seized the learning opportunities that the army provided and became a serial innovator.

In January 1958, when the United States launched its first satellite, Richard wanted to become the first doctor to perform surgery in space. He became an army astronaut candidate three years in a row but failed to make the grade. So he turned failure into purpose and instead worked at Stanford University and NASA, to help create the first surgical robot, reasoning that even if he couldn’t perform surgery in space, perhaps his creation could. The technology was ultimately commercialized as the da Vinci Surgical System.

Richard served as chief of surgery for a MASH unit during the 1983 invasion of Granada and as commander of an evacuation hospital in Saudi Arabia during 1991’s Operation Desert Storm. After Desert Storm, he joined DARPA as program manager in advanced biomedical technology.
Both at DARPA and in his current Pentagon role, Richard’s work has involved “technology harvesting” – identifying new technologies that have the potential to change the face of medicine and bringing them under the military’s funding and research umbrella.

In more than 200 publications and presentations, Richard provides a glimpse of a future in which robotics and other advances are radically transforming the human body as we know it: military dog-tags embedded with complete CT scans of each soldier providing a baseline if the soldier is injured; surgery performed via robots managed from a remote console; virtual reality training for surgeons; biosurgery that manipulates genetic material or operates directly upon genes; intelligent prostheses and synthetically grown tissue and organs; and the possibility of radical longevity of 150 years or more.

While striving to practice the complete discipline of surgery, he is aggressively pursuing the leading edge of advanced technologies to formulate the architecture for the next generation of Medicine.

Website: https://depts.washington.edu/biointel/

Kate joined Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign as the New Media Director of Video in the spring of 2007, and we all now how it ended. Team Obama won! The US now has the most tech-savvy president ever and his government is sprinting ahead of even enterprises at the cutting edge of using Enterprise 2.0 technologies for business growth and impact.

By the end of the presidential election campaign, Kate and her team had produced over 2,000 videos, which ranged from thirty second spots to twenty minute documentaries. According to TechPresident.com, total viewing time totaled 14,548,809.05 hours versus 488,093.01 hours for the opponent’s videos, a ratio of 30:1. They estimated the value at $46,893,000 for the campaign.

Prior to the Obama campaign, Kate produced and directed documentaries for CNN Presents, winning Emmys for her work on “The Enemy Within” and “The Struggle for Islam.” Her 2004 documentary about the Dean campaign, “True Believers,” was also nominated for an Emmy.

Most recently, she served as Content Lead for the Presidential Transition Team’s website, Change.gov, and as a New Media consultant to the White House Office of Health Reform and the Department of Health and Human Services. She currently serves as News Director for VBS.tv.
Kate received a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.

What do you get when one-part native American Indian and one-part Hispanic completes a PhD in Quantum Physics, transplants herself from Japan into the creative capital of Europe, becomes director of strategy for one of the world’s top advertising agencies, teaches MBA students at a leading European business school, starts an Institute for Collaboration Creativity & Culture, establishes a foundation to put a world-changing Learning Programme into practice for children and parents, and runs her own business consulting to a global portfolio of clients on the side? You get Colby Stuart- quantum woman!

As Creative Director of Quantumbrands, she helps companies use their brand and brand values as an organizing tool to engage people in growing the business in creative ways. Because of her studies in physics and appreciation of network dynamics, Colby has been an early evangelist for transdisciplinary collaboration. She started The Dutch Connection in March 2004, making use of social business networking platforms, gradually forming like-minded associations that started to meet face to face in Amsterdam. From these think-and-do tanks emerged a community of practice with a shared vision and common purpose around growing innovation in business cultures. On October 4, 2005, the Institute for Collaboration Creativity & Culture was established.

Since then, Colby’s work as co-founder and director of The Institute for Collaboration, Creativity & Culture (IFCCC) has centred around discovery-based learning for innovation and prototyping new ways, new communities, new products, new formats and channels and new ways of organizing. IFCCC draws on experts from the fields of science, media, technology, communication and creative development to communicate in multi-sensory contexts with digital video and sound to engage with people in poignant ways that reach where simple words can’t.

Colby’s consuming passion as chairman of the Kids 2020 Foundation is to introduce a value’s based system for choices into children’s lives that will
balance human, social, creative and financial capital
so children can grow up defining their worth and contribution to a sustainable society in more terms than money.

Blog: Quantum-playshuns
Twitter: @quantumbrands

Amantha has a Doctorate in Organisational Psychology, which means that aside from being able to read minds better than most people, she brings a scientific yet highly practical approach to the field of creativity and innovation.

Amantha has that rare talent of taking learnings from science and academia and applying them to practical, real world situations in ways that are simple to understand.

Through Inventium, Amantha has worked with C-Level executives through to university graduates, and has clients across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Africa, and Europe. Her clients include LEGO, Kimbery-Clark, Ogilvy + Mather, BP, Deloitte, OMD, Qantas, Vodafone, and Fosters.

Amantha has written extensively on the subjects of creativity and innovation, and her words can be read in Fast Thinking, Marketing Magazine, Contagious, Human Capital Magazine, Motivation Magazine, Australian Anthill, Marketing Profs, B&T Weekly, International Journal of Selection and Assessment, and Educational and Psychological Measurement and Evaluation.

Amantha had an international record deal for her debut album ‘Like Samantha without the S’, prays to the God of Kevin Spacey, and used to be freakishly good at table tennis.

Mehrdad Baghai is Managing Director of Alchemy Growth Partners, a boutique advisory and venture firm in Sydney that works with works with the leaders of promising growth companies (like AMP!) to make deep and lasting contributions to their innovation and business building initiatives.

Previously, Mehrdad was an Executive Director at the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, with overarching responsibility for growth. In his time as partner in the Sydney and Toronto offices of McKinsey and Company, he was co-leader of the firm’s global growth practice serving clients in the technology, media and financial services sectors, and specializing in strategies for turbulent environments.

As an attorney, he has been called to the state bar in New York and Massachusetts and his public sector experience includes an economist role with the World Bank and a consultant to the UN Secretariat. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Unicef Australia and has participated in various social and economic development projects. Together with his wife, he is a founder of The High Resolves Initiative which creates opportunities to provoke teenagers to reflect on what being a global citizen means, how history will judge our actions 50-100 years from now and how we can all make a difference.

Mehrdad received a B.S.E. with highest honors in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, where he also completed a joint degree on public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School. He continued his education in public policy at Harvard where he completed an M.P.P. as a Kennedy Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. He also completed a J.D. with high honors from Harvard Law School.

Mehrdad is probably best-known for his international bestsellers, The Alchemy of Growth and The Granularity of Growth. He is currently researching a new book on Collective Action and will be sharing insights from his current research with us at AMPLIFY 2009. It’s so fresh it’s not even hit the press yet!

The study of collective action is about a “we” intention, as opposed to a “me” intention, and converges with other disciplines including anthropology, developmental psychology, and economics.

With one of the first PhD’s in Complex Systems and Complexity Science from the University of Queensland in June 1999, Andrew has gained global experience in working with organisations in Australia and the USA, the Netherlands and the UK. The “complex systems” perspective has allowed him to make contributions in the areas of systems and software development, knowledge management, social research, facilitation and management consulting. In his spare time, he juggles.

Today, Andrew’s focus is on how complexity-inspired approaches can change the way we work and his presentations and workshop at AMPLIFY09 will explore how the new science of complexity provides us with a new tool box of skills and techniques to tackle the question of how we can thrive in complexity. The only problem is – some of these new skills and techniques require a different kind of thinking and doing.

Are you up for the challenge?

Greg Stone is the CTO for Microsoft Australia, and is responsible for Microsoft’s technology policy and strategy initiatives working across Public and Private sectors as well as contributing to Microsoft’s long term technology blueprints – particularly in the areas of identity, collaboration, human-machine design and social software.

Microsoft will spend over $8Billion this year on R&D as part of an ongoing quest to push the boundaries of what is possible through the “magic” of software. The company touches almost every industry and trend area, from consumer devices to High-Performance Computing. Greg is part of the team mapping the convergence of human and technology trends and helping define the future of society’s technology experience.

Greg joined Microsoft Australia in 2001 with over 20 years of operational experience across a broad range of sectors.

A framework for “total knowledge leadership” and how to exploit new media to grow the knowledge capital of your business. Case studies and examples of collaborative communities will be drawn from across Asia, especially India and China. Walk away with a “Monday morning checklist” to tap knowledge flows using new media to the benefit of all your stakeholders.

Madan is another prime example of a global netizen- knowledgeable across multiple disciplines, networked, and mobile in every sense.
While his base station is Bangalore where he co-ordinates the Bangalore K-Community of knowledge management professionals, he travels extensively as editor-at-large of Wireless World Magazine, writer for the Poynter Institute on new media trends, consultant to governments, including Australia, and as researcher and editor of a three-book series: “The Asia Pacific Internet Handbook”, “The Knowledge Management Chronicles” and “AfricaDotEdu”.
Madan practices knowledge-sharing actively as speaker in over 60 countries around the world and as lecturer in KM and adjunct faculty head at both the International School of Information Management in Mysore, and the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, with exchanges to Malmo University in Sweden. He is conference chair for Digital Worlds, Wireless India, the annual summit of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre and RFID India.

Madan was formerly the communications director at the United Nations Inter Press Service bureau in New York, and vice president at IndiaWorld Communications in Bombay. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay and the University of Massachusetts with an M.Sc. in computer science and a Ph.D. in communications.
He served on the nominating committee of ICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which designs and manages the infrastructure of the global Internet, and the board of directors of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He is currently on the board of editors of the journal “Electronic Markets” and the Journal of Community Informatics, and was on the board of the Journal of Convergence. Madan was also on the international editorial board of the recently published book, “Transforming e-Knowledge.”
Like many of the other AMPLIFY speakers, Madan has a vibrant creative life with a passion for music, acting as DJ for world music at WorldSpace Radio, and as world music editor for Rave magazine.