Theme: Regenerate

How can we reinvigorate businesses, our societies and ourselves? Is it time to start over – to go back to basics? What are the lessons of the innovation economy?

As our leaders struggle to tame an ongoing financial crisis, as political change provides both inspiration and instability, and as everyone goes mobile, TEDxLondonBusinessSchool will provide a fresh perspective on what it means to renew, react, and regenerate.

Bloomberg Auditorium
City Gate House
39-45 Finsbury Square
London, London, City of, EC2A 1PQ
United Kingdom

Adrian Wooldridge

Adrian Wooldridge is the political editor and Bagehot columnist of The Economist. He has also worked as the Economist’s Schumpeter columnist and management editor, Lexington columnist and Washington bureau chief, and Los Angeles bureau chief. He is the author or co-author of nine books.

Alex Edmans

Alex Edmans is a Professor of Finance at London Business School, specialising in corporate governance, executive compensation, and corporate social responsibility. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, written for the Harvard Business Review, and presented to the Bank of England, Federal Reserve, HM Treasury, IMF, SEC and more.

Baillie Aaron

Baillie Aaron is the founder and CEO of Spark Inside, a London-based charity providing professional coaching in prisons to promote rehabilitation and desistance from crime. She believes all people, even former prisoners, can lead meaningful lives and should be given an equal opportunity to succeed. To date, Spark Inside has coached 400+ participants through its programs, enabling former prisoners to become law-abiding citizens who are economically self-sufficient and personally fulfilled.

Jasper Jackson

Jasper Jackson is a media and tech journalist focusing on how digital disruption has challenged established organisations and opened up new opportunities. Most recently, he has been the digital editor at the New Statesman, overseeing and writing extensive coverage of the UK and international media industries, with a particular focus on new models and strategies for adapting to change and how journalism has evolved to take advantage of digital structures and new technology. He has also spoken on issues such as the lessons the media can learn from Brexit and the changing digital advertising ecosystem. He has an undergraduate degree in Politics and Social Policy from Edinburgh University and a Master’s degree in Investigative Journalism from City University.

Julia Hobsbawm

Julia Hobsbawm is an expert on connectedness in modern working life. A prominent entrepreneur, media commentator and international speaker for corporate audiences, she has emerged as a leading voice on the future of the workplace, Social Health and behavioural networks: how to best use social network science to enhance productivity, engagement and talent management. She was made the world’s first professor in Networking in 2011 and is Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School in London and at the University of Suffolk.

Julian Birkinshaw

Julian Birkinshaw is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Deputy Dean for Programs, and Director of the Deloitte Institute at the London Business School. Professor Birkinshaw’s main area of expertise is in the strategy and organisation of large multinational corporations, and on such specific issues as subsidiary-headquarters relationships, corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, the changing role of the corporate HQ, organisation design, and knowledge management. Professor Birkinshaw was ranked 43rd in the 2015 “Thinkers 50” list of the top global thinkers in the field of Management. He is regularly quoted in international media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, Bloomberg Business Week and The Times. He speaks regularly at business conferences in the UK, Europe, North America and Australia.

Katy Portell

Katy Portell graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Portland, Oregon, USA with a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Communication. She has worked for 2 ½ years as Volunteer Program Coordinator for Southwest Transplant Alliance, one of the largest of 58 federally-designated Organ Procurement Organizations in the United States. She is currently the recipient of an International Postgraduate Scholarship and is completing her Master’s in Public Relations and Corporate Communications at Kingston University, London, UK. Katy is determined to combine her passion and talent to promote the importance of organ, eye, and tissue donation and the impact one person can have.

Lucy Kellaway

Lucy Kellaway has spent the last three decades at the Financial Times writing columns that poke fun at corporate life, business jargon and management fads. She is the newspaper’s office agony aunt and inventor of the insufferable fictional character, Martin Lukes. In September 2017 she is leaving all this to be a maths teacher in an inner city school in London. In November 2016 she co-founded Now Teach, a charity designed to persuade high-flying fifty somethings from the corporate world to train alongside her. For nine years she was a non-executive director of Admiral plc.

Panos Athanasopoulos

Panos Athanasopoulos’ research is guided by two questions: Do speakers of different languages think differently? Do bilinguals think differently from monolinguals? He pursued these questions during his PhD at the University of Essex, where he developed and implemented a novel framework for studying the bilingual mind using a mixture of verbal and non-verbal tasks. This earned him a Graduate Student Award from the American Association for Applied Linguistics. During his first full time post at Bangor University in Wales he built on his multidisciplinary methodological expertise, and with colleagues, pioneered a novel experimental paradigm to study unconscious perception. He is now the Chair in Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University, where he directs the Perception and Learning Laboratory (PERLL). In the past 5 years, his projects have focused on the cognitive flexibility that learning new languages confers on the human mind.

Rafe Offer

Rafe Offer started his career with roles in advertising across a variety of sectors, taking on senior marketing positions with Coca-Cola, The Walt Disney Company and Diageo where he gained a broad, unparalleled view of the ever-changing world of business. Internationally hailed for turning multiple major brands into what they are today, Rafe has since left the marketing world to pursue his passion for music by building Sofar Sounds, now a worldwide movement. A cutting-edge music company and worldwide promoter of new bands, his creation has been described by the Guardian as ‘a quiet revolution’ and New York Magazine as ‘one of the top new brands in America’.

Randall Peterson

Randall S. Peterson is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Academic Director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School. He is a highly-experienced researcher, teacher and consultant. His expertise is in all aspects of organisational behaviour and he is an internationally-recognised authority on developing high-performance and multinational teams, conflict resolution, assessing leadership, leader personality, and developing interpersonal skills. Randall obtained his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in social psychology. He teaches the leadership week on both the flagship Senior Executive and Accelerated Development Programmes, as well as for the leadership degree programmes. Randall has also worked with a wide range of executives and leading organisations worldwide, ranging from consulting, to banking, energy, and retail. Randall is also a regular contributor to a wide range of academic journals, book publications, industry outlets and conferences. His research has featured in a wide variety of outlets from the Journal of Applied Psychology to HR Magazine and Harvard Business Review.

Reinier Zeldenrust

Reinier Zeldenrust is an astrophysicist and former management consultant who now works at the cutting edge of building systems, whether that is finding new ways for teams to collaborate on construction, designing radical new solutions for buildings to save energy, or using robotics to push the limits of building on earth and in space.

Sile O'Modhrain

Sile O’Modhrain is developing “the Holy Braille”, a full-page refreshable braille device that aims to increase Braille literacy among blind people worldwide. In over 30 years there have been few significant changes to Braille display technology, and the existing options are expensive and complex to manufacture. The goal: a high-density refreshable tactile array at a much lower cost.

Tiiram Sunderland

Tiiram Sunderland is a current MBA student at London Business School. Prior to LBS, he completed MAs in Public Policy and International Politics and spent 5 years working for the Australian Government developing climate policy and programmes to improve economic and social outcomes for the poor in the Asia-Pacific. Tiiram is passionate about sustainability, education and inclusive development, and his career has taken him from the United Nations Environment Programme in New York, to the board of the youth education not-for-profit, CISV International.

Weijie Kong

Before enrolling as an MBA candidate at London Business School, Weijie Kong was an engineer in the solar energy industry in Singapore. Ever since he picked up hip-hop dancing as an undergraduate, he has straddled the two seemingly contrasting realms of engineering and dance. By day, Weijie worked as an engineer, and devoted the remainder of his time to dancing with the contemporary dance company RAW Moves, creating and performing in multiple performances by local and international choreographers.

Yutaka Kunita

Yutaka Kunita is a dexterous IT strategist with a Ph.D in Mathematical Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration. After her 15-year career in Research & Development at leading media technology companies, she has decided to restart her life by focusing on the art of transitions through life and human-centric technologies in the start of the era of 100-year lives and artificial intelligence.