PROGRAM Highlights
OPENING GENERAL SESSION • MONDAY, 9:00-10:30 a.m.
Richard Florida Author, The Great Reset and The Rise of the Creative Class, Director, Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Founder, Creative Class Group
The Great Reset:
How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
 Richard Florida is one of the world's leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness, demographic trends, and cultural and technological innovation. Esquire Magazine recently named him one of the Best and Brightest in America. He is the author of Who's Your City: How the Places We Pick Shape the Lives We Lead, which takes a look at the importance of place and how it affects everything from job opportunities to economic prosperity to relationships and networks.
In The Great Reset, Florida provides an engaging and sweeping examination of these previous economic epochs, or "resets." He distills the deep forces that have altered physical and social landscapes and eventually reshaped economies and societies. Looking toward the future, Florida identifies the patterns that will drive the next Great Reset and transform virtually every aspect of our lives—from how and where we live, to how we work, to how we invest in individuals and infrastructure, to how we shape our cities and regions. Florida shows how these forces, when combined, will spur a fresh era of growth and prosperity, define a new geography of progress, and create surprising opportunities for all of us.
His ideas have been featured in major ad campaigns from BMW and Apple and are being used globally to change the way regions and nations do business. Combining in-depth analysis, cutting-edge trends, a fascinating personal story, and just a touch of self-deprecating humor, Florida is one of the world's most sought after speakers.
CLOSING GENERAL SESSION • TUESDAY, 5:15-6:15 p.m.
Jeff Salz Anthropologist, Explorer, Mountaineer, Author and Television Personality
The Adventure of Change
 Jeff Salz has made a lifetime of adventure. An acclaimed explorer - with a Ph.D. in anthropology - he has traversed most of the remaining blank spots on the globe. The author of The Way of Adventure: Transforming Your Life and Work with Spirit and Vision, Jeff creates the foundation for creative thinking in any organization by presenting a unique perspective on risk-taking and innovation. Jeff has spent 30 years as a mountain guide, and 10 years as a university professor. For the last 20 years, he has been safely guiding top tier executives at organizations like Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Walt Disney, and eBay through the turbulent seas of change while facilitating enhanced teamwork, innovation and creativity. Translating the lessons he learned in over 30 years of exploration and expedition leadership into his 6 Adventure Steps, Jeff gives audiences the tools they need to be adventurous in their work and life. Using stirring tales drawn from his experiences with the legends, myths and personal lives of people from remote regions around the world, with award-winning photography AND music, this presentation creates a unique experience whose effects last a lifetime. MEGA SESSION • TUESDAY, 9:00-10:00 a.m.
Bending Space – A Mind Expanding Experience Three exciting speakers opened minds to new ideas and encouraged us to see the world of corporate real estate in a very different light. Diverse aspects of SPACE were explored through engaging 20-minute talks brimming with insights designed to encourage you to think quickly and grab hold of new and challenging ideas.  Using Images to Think, Innovate and Drive Business Tom Wujec, Expert on Innovation, Fellow at Autodesk Experience the behind-the-scenes business revolution happening around the world. Creative leaders in the shrewdest companies are using a constellation of new tools to make work visible. Visualization – thinking and communicating with images – is rapidly becoming the principal tool to foster innovation and business success. It's also a powerful new tool for leadership, which can provide dramatic gains in productivity, cost reductions, and corporate confidence. With interactive visuals, Tom Wujec shows you how teams at the world's leading companies are using simple images to build visual models that create profound new ways of understanding their employees, their customers, their markets, their products, and their competitors. With high spirits and deep authority, he leads you through exactly how to formulate, implement and measure the effectiveness of this new strategy. Teams come to see the real dynamics of their business: they discover patterns, they build new relationships, and they see their real impact on the company's overall direction. If we are going to work smarter in the information economy, Wujec says, we need easy-to-use approaches and tools that help us clarify what's important, focus on how to get there, and ignore the rest. We need the power of visual clarity at the heart of this talk.  Nanotechnology Innovation Ted Sargent, Innovator in Nanotechnology What is nanotechnology? Ted Sargent took attendees to the heart of the true world of nanotechnology – a world more fascinating and surprising than Michael Creighton's nanobots – and what that means for the space around us, both big and small. "Nano" refers to one billionth of a meter: the size of a few atoms clustered together to form a molecule. In living organisms, atoms and molecules organize themselves into proteins, tissues, and ultimately living, thinking, emoting beings. Nanotechnologists are seeking to harness the same principles to prompt matter into constructing itself. Ted Sargent leads a lab of researchers making designer molecules and materials for communications and computing, medicine, and tapping new energy sources. He speaks from the perspective of one innovating at the forefront of the next industrial revolution. Learn how nanotechnology developed, what scientists have achieved up to the moment, and where it could all lead.  Biologist at the Design Table Taryn Mead, Biologist at the Design Table for the Biomimicry Guild With a bird's eye view on planning, architectural and production challenges, Taryn Mead provided insights into ecological principles that can be used to enhance the way designs fit into the landscape of a place. Taryn's training in ecology and the socio-industrial aspects of environmental issues provides a systems-based platform for discussion of biomimetic principles and methodologies. As a Biologist at the Design Table for the Guild, she specializes in Nature's functions at the ecosystem level. She helped us to gain an understanding of a design process that asks how local organisms flourish in their regional habitat and how to incorporate ecosystem nutrient cycling into landscape scale designs. | 
