David Ricketts

Innovation Fellow, Scholar and Professor, CXO Partner, Cutting-edge innovator, Award Winning Scientist

Dr. David S. Ricketts received his PhD from Harvard University and has held appointments at Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, MIT and North Carolina State University. He was the inaugural Innovation Science Fellow in the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. For the past decade Dr. Ricketts has helped shape the Innovation in Science and Technology courses in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as well as found the civic innovation program. He teaches and speaks regularly on innovation and business strategy. He focuses on the role of the individual innovator and helps senior leaders develop new innovators and systemic innovation in their companies.

In addition to Dr. Ricketts' innovation research, he is an award-winning scientist and engineer whose innovations have been featured by Popular Science, Smithsonian, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, ESPN, and many other science news outlets. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Investigator Award. His work has appeared twice in Nature, as well as numerous IEEE publications, including a feature article in the Proceedings of the IEEE. His scientific research focuses on the physical limitations of circuits and systems and how to address them through new materials, circuits and devices.

David L. Ager

Senior Lecturer and Managing Director, Harvard Business School, Executive Education

David Ager is a Senior Lecturer in Executive Education.  He engages CEOs, CHROs, and their teams to design and deliver customized executive development experiences for executive, senior and high potential leaders.  The companies hail from diverse sectors including energy, fast moving consumer goods, quick service food, finance, government, media, automotive, retail, gems and jewelry, spirits and luxury goods.  His teaching addresses a broad set of topics within leadership development and organizational behavior.

David co-chairs Families in Business and Building a Legacy: Family Office Wealth Management, two Harvard Business School executive education programs focused on Governance of the Family Enterprise.

Since 2013 David has co-chaired the GIA Global Leadership Program, which brings together executive and decision-makers who constitute industry leadership, representing the full scope of activity and geography of the global gem and jewelry industry.   David also chairs Harvard Business School’s first two executive development programs intended for Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal and Indigenous Leaders. The first of these programs, Leading People and Investing to Build Sustainable Communities, was launched in 2017.  David worked closely with AFOA, NAFOA, NCAI, and HUNAP to design this program, which is intended to explore how governance practices can shape the management of investments (e.g. sovereign wealth funds) with a longer-term view toward building sustainable communities.  The second program focuses on leading high performing Aboriginal Financial Institutions.  These organizations provide capital to finance Aboriginal small and medium-sized enterprises with the goal to increase social and economic self-reliance and sustainability for Indigenous people.

From 2004 to 2012 Professor Ager served as a faculty member and the director of undergraduate studies in the Sociology Department at Harvard University.  One of the first faculty to introduce the case method of learning to Harvard College, Ager offered courses on leadership, organizational sociology, and field research methods.  In 2008 he introduced the first undergraduate course on Social Entrepreneurship at Harvard College with an emphasis on using entrepreneurial approaches to create for-profit, not-for-profit, and hybrid ventures to address social problems and bring about social change.

In 2004 Ager earned a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior, a joint degree granted by Harvard Business School and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.   He also earned an Honors B.Sc. in Economics and Human Biology from the University of Toronto, an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario and a Master's degree in Sociology from Harvard University.  In 2010 Harvard University awarded Ager the Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for excellence in teaching and dedication to undergraduate education.  In 2011 he was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for excellence in teaching at Harvard University by the Alpha-Iota of Massachusetts Phi Beta Kappa chapter.  Ager sits on the board of MJM Yachts and is an advisor to several student organizations at Harvard College.

SHUYA GONG

Interaction Designer with a Background in Mechanical Engineering and Expertise in Systems and Ventures

Shuya Gong is an interaction designer with a background in mechanical engineering and expertise in systems and ventures. Formerly a design director at IDEO, Shuya started her work in collaborative innovation through exploring blockchain technologies with an ecosystem of financial institutions including Nasdaq, Fidelity, and Citibank to understand how emergent technologies would change everyday experiences.

Throughout her career, Shuya has worked across industries spanning food, fashion, and fertility with Fortune 50 companies on shaping their future strategies at the intersection of new cultural trends and technologies. Recently, her work explored the new emotions that cyberphysical interactions and novel digital mediums introduce into products and services and is an investor at IDEO CoLab Ventures.

Her work can be found on shelves at Target through the initial brand concept of Good and Gather, a $2B+ flagship label, and in circular return systems at select Starbucks locations. Shuya is also an innovation fellow and lecturer at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a founder and partner of the regenerative design collective Maybe Ventures, and an herbal apprentice at Agape Healing, a traditional Chinese medicine practice founded by her father.

Talk to her about rapid prototyping with emergent technologies, living life without plastic, and the emotional ergonomics of chaotic systems!

DAVID A. SINCLAIR, AO, PHD

Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

David A. Sinclair, A.O., Ph.D. is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. At Harvard Medical School, Professor Sinclair heads a leading research lab best known for its work on why we age and how to control it. He has published over 180 papers that have been cited over 83,000 times and is the inventor on more than 50 patents. Professor Sinclair is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded over a dozen successful companies including MetroBiotech, EdenRoc Sciences, and Life Biosciences.

Professor Sinclair is a leading world authority on aging and longevity and has been recognized as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People In The World for his scientific research and Information Theory of Aging. Professor Sinclair is the New York Times bestselling author of Lifespan: Why We Age-And Why We Don’t Have To and host of the Lifespan podcast, which has peaked as the #1 Health & Fitness show on Apple Podcasts.

Professor Sinclair and his work have been featured in media publications including Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He has received more than 40 awards for his research and scientific breakthroughs, including Innovator of the Year, the National Institutes of Health’s Pioneer Award, and appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia for his work in scientific communication and national security. Professor Sinclair holds board seats on for-profit and non-profit organizations, and co-founded the scientific journal Aging as well as Fully Aligned Co, which works to democratize access to knowledge and tools to enhance mind and body wellbeing.

Verne Harnish

Founder and CEO of Scaling Up

Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 16,000 members worldwide, and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today.

Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over 200 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past four decades helping companies scaleup.

He’s the author of the bestseller Mastering the Rockefeller Habits; authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times," for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword; and wrote Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) which has been translated into 22 languages and has won eight major international book awards including the prestigious International Book Award for Best General Business book. His latest book, Scaling Up Compensation, rocketed to the #1 HR book on Amazon.

Verne also chairs the annual ScaleUp Summits and serves on several boards including vice chair of The Riordan Clinic; co-founder and chair of Geoversity; and board member of the social venture Million Dollar Women. A private investor in many scaleups, Verne enjoys piano, tennis, and magic as a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

William Isaacs

CEO of dialogos, Author

Dr. William Isaacs is the Founder and President of dialogos, a transformational consulting and strategic leadership development firm based in Concord, MA, and founder of Generative Capital, a strategic and human capital advisor for Investors and Funds. He taught for nearly three decades as a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where he co- founded the Organizational Learning Center at MIT with Peter Senge. He wrote Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, which has been translated into many languages, and was featured in Fast Company as a guide to “the secret of good informal conversation.” It has been acclaimed by a variety of reviewers as the definitive guide to profound change through speaking and listening. It is also frequently cited and used as a central guide to the practice of dialogue in settings around the world.

For the past 30 years Dr. Isaacs has advised CEO’s, Prime Ministers and senior leaders in corporations, development organizations and governments on how to produce transformative results in their teams and systems. His focus is on deepening individual and collective confidence in collective leadership, which entails strengthening the quality of dialogue, reducing polarization and cross-boundary conflict, and catalyzing large-scale transformative change—in contexts ranging from union-management conflicts, safety breakdowns in high hazard industries, strategic and culture change in global multinationals, enterprise software implementation, and national and regional strategy development.

Isaacs has taught dialogue, the principles of self-leadership, and generative change to thousands of executives, development professionals, and national and policy leaders. His work is featured in the curriculum of many programs and courses on dialogue around the world. Dr. Isaacs received an A.B. in policy studies from Dartmouth College, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and an M.Phil. and D.Phil from Oxford University.

• Advised the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP); coached the UNEP senior leadership team and facilitated strategic dialogue with its Committee of Permanent Representatives (CPR)
• Facilitated six year “Champions” Dialogue for advisors to the Prime Ministers from all South Asian countries leading to multibillion dollar strategic investment and policy alignment
• Advisor and facilitator for International Monetary Fund (IMF) Board and leadership team
• Advisor and facilitator for World Bank Board and leadership Team; focused on enhancing the quality of board strategic
• Facilitated strategic dialogue among senior political leaders of Nepal on energy strategy
• Advised the Prime Minister and Cabinet of Serbia, and Prime Minister and Cabinet of Albania
• Advised Chief(s) and National Leadership of US Forest Service – led multi-year projects that significantly reduced fatalities and improved firefighting pattern in most expensive and dangerous wildland fires in the US
• Advised and coached CEO’s and senior teams of numerous F500 and global corporations and institutions, including BP, Hoffman LaRoche, International Finance Corporation
• Advise Private Equity and Venture Capital Fund leaders and their portfolio companies on leadership and scaling risk and accelerated development

Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and is a Faculty Partner in the Silicon Valley incubator Mach 49. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation.

He is a NYT and WSJ Best Selling Author. His most recent best seller is Three Box Solution.

His Harvard Business Review articles “Engineering Reverse Innovations” and “Stop the Innovation Wars” won McKinsey Awards for best article published in HBR. His HBR articles “How GE Is Disrupting Itself” and “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention” are HBR all-time top-50 bestsellers.

VG was named by Thinkers 50 as a Top 3 Management Thinker in the world and received the Breakthrough Innovation Award in 2011. VG was inducted into Thinkers 50 Management Thinkers Hall of Fame and was given the Distinguished Achievement Award for most contributions to the understanding of innovation in 2019. VG is the only recipient of Distinguished Achievement Awards in two different categories from Thinkers 50.

VG has worked with CEOs and top management teams in over 40% of the Fortune 500 companies to discuss, challenge, and escalate their thinking about strategy. He has been a keynote speaker in the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, TED, and World Economic Forum at Davos.

VG received his doctorate from the Harvard Business School and was awarded the Robert Bowne Prize for the best thesis proposal. He received his MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School. VG received his Chartered Accountancy degree in India where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal for obtaining the first rank nationwide.

You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.