Speakers

Christoph Birkholz

Dr. Christoph Birkholz (37) is an entrepreneur based in Zurich, Switzerland. He is a co-founder and chairman of the board of Impact Hub Zürich AG, the biggest Hub in a network of over 100 Impact Hubs and 1’000 employees across the globe. Christoph also co-founded Kickstart Innovation, an open innovation and intrapreneurship program, as well as Inyova, mainstreaming impact investing online. He initiated several spinoffs and ventures in the Impact Hub network, including chairing the Impact Hub Switzerland Association and the Global Impact Hub Fellowship Program.
Christoph has received a PhD in impact investing from University of St.Gallen, and he is an alumnus of Witten/Herdecke University and INSEAD. Christoph serves on the board of Panter AG, an international technology and engineering company, as well as of Alternative Bank Switzerland, a pioneer in sustainable banking.

Eva Pauline Bossow

Entrepreneurship, communication and management in the creative industries are the common threads in Eva Pauline Bossow's biography. As Managing Director of the Zurich Centre for Creative Economies, she uses this experience to build up the competence and research center. After her studies, Eva Pauline Bossow worked as head of an audience study and as marketing manager at the Symphony Orchestra of Berne - both tasks inspired her to develop her own business idea. During its development and founding period, she was involved in the Swiss startup landscape and, among other things, initiated the "Startup Weekend Creative Business" together with a business partner. This was followed by positions as Head of Communications at the Zentrum Paul Klee and Head of Marketing at an international IT group, where she was responsible for the Health division and for a young e-health startup. She is active as a coach and workshop leader for entrepreneurs and serves on the advisory board of the Creative Hub Switzerland, among others.

Sarah Douglas

Sarah designs inspiring ways to engage people on important topics. After her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art and a career spanning art, innovation and education, she founded The Liminal Space in 2012 with a mission to bring together cross-disciplinary creativity, innovation and education to create social and strategic change.
The Liminal Space uses art and design to create unique experiences that transform what people think, feel and do. The purpose-led agency has built a reputation for delivering highly creative and pioneering public engagement experiences with the most pressing concerns of people and society at its heart. Recent work ranges from a new exhibition on climate change at the Natural History Museum, an interactive installation exploring ageing today at the Barbican and a major research inquiry into how Museums of the Future can drive social change, to leading a Wellcome Trust backed programme addressing the health needs of low income workers and engaging the public with science research at London Covid19 vaccination centre.

Céline Fallet

Céline Fallet is a Swiss crowdfunding pioneer and designer. After completing her graphic design apprenticeship, she studied at the ZHdK in the Design Department and completed her bachelor's degree in 2012, where she developed a crowdfunding guide for the platform wemakeit as her diploma project. She was instrumental in setting up the largest Swiss crowdfunding platform wemakeit and its community of over 360,000 users and taught seminars on crowdfunding, storytelling and community building. In addition, she worked as a designer and communicator on a mandate basis for various projects in the cultural and creative sectors. Since 2018, she has been working full-time at wemakeit as managing director and founded the crowdinvesting platform oomnium and the association "Impact Fund 20" in 2019.

Anikó Hannák

Anikó Hannák is an Assistant Professor at the computer science department of the University of Zürich. Broadly, her work investigates a variety of content serving websites such as Search Engines, Online Stores, Job Search Sites or Freelance Marketplaces. In this quickly changing online ecosystem companies track users' every move and feed the collected data into big data algorithms in order to match them with the most interesting, most relevant content. Since these algorithms learn on human data they are likely to pick up on social biases and unintentionally reinforce them. In her PhD work she created a methodology called Algorithmic Auditing which tries to uncover the potential negative impacts of large online systems. Examples of such audits include examining the "Filter Bubble effect" on Google Search, online price discrimination or detecting inequalities in online labor markets.

Marco Huwiler

Marco Huwiler has been serving as Accenture Switzerland's Country Managing Director at since early 2020. Marco believes in the importance of innovation as a source of competitiveness for Swiss companies. He is convinced that, in a post-pandemic world, organizations need to radically rethink their business models and value propositions. This includes building a digital core in the Cloud, creating strong digital ecosystems across industries and rapidly scaling innovation.
Previously, Marco led Accenture's Financial Services practice in Switzerland. In this role, he helped his banking and insurance clients become digital leaders in their industries. In addition to his work at Accenture, Marco is a member of the Steering Committee at digitalswitzerland, the country’s umbrella organization for the technology and digital sector. Marco has been with Accenture since 2001. He holds a Masters degree in Economics from the University of Fribourg.

Tabea Iseli

Tabea studied Game Design at the Zurich University of the Arts. Originally a Print Production Professional and Graphic Designer, she’s a jack of all trades when it comes to game development: Her skill set includes programming, game design, graphic design, as well as project management. Since 2014, Tabea worked for multiple renowned Swiss game companies and universities, such as Blindflug Studios and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. In 2019 she founded Stardust, an indie game studio developing meaningful and diverse games. Her work challenges the status-quo of video games and expands the boundaries of topics and target audiences addressed by games. In her free-time, she's also a Women in Games ambassador.

Georgios Kontoleon

Georgis Jorgo Kontoleon is co-founder of Impact Hub Zurich and the software company Panter AG. Currently a member of the Executive Board at Impact Hub Zurich, responsible for business development and site management. In the past, he designed and managed the development of the Impact Hub locations Colab at Sihlquai and Kraftwerk in Zurich-Selnau.

Philipp Kotsopoulos

Philipp Kotsopoulos is the Head of Z-Kubator at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He completed an international trainee programme with the logistics group A. P. Moller/Maersk in Hamburg and Copenhagen and graduated from the University of St. Gallen (HSG) with a BA in International Affairs & Governance. His professional career took him from a job in e-commerce in Copenhagen to the management of the HSG Alumni association in St. Gallen to Condor Films in Zurich, where he worked as a production manager and producer overseeing advertising and TV productions as well as business development projects. At ZHdK, he built up the fundraising activities from 2011 to 2016 and has headed the Z-Kubator since 2016. In addition, he has been involved in the founding teams of various spin-offs and startups, teaches fundraising and entrepreneurship and is a board member and vice president of the ZHdK alumni association Netzhdk.

Lisa Lang

Lisa Lang is a European entrepreneur, technologist and international keynote speaker. Her brands ElektroCouture, OFundamentO, and ThePowerHouse are leading agencies for FashionTech, wearable technologies, smart textiles manufacturing and making things glow. From her experience as an entrepreneur, she has gained recognition as one of Forbes Europe’s Top 50 Women in Tech, top 100 most influential people in wearable tech worldwide, one of 25 leaders in fashion and technology worldwide, and has been listed as one of the 50 most important women for innovation & startups in the EU. Beyond her work on her companies, Lisa has been a mentor for fashion and tech-focused programs – serving as a jury and mentor for Fashion Council Germany & H&M Fellowship Programme and as an Evangelista for the Berlin Geekettes.

Frédéric Martel

Frédéric is an academic, journalist and a New York Times bestseller author and the Research Director of the Zurich Centre for Creative Economies. As an academic, he is a professor of creative economies at Zurich University for the Arts (ZHdK) and the director of the Zurich Centre for Creative Economies (ZCCE). He has been researcher fellow at the CERI, Center for International Studies, at Sciences Po-Paris and advised the European Commission as a member of New Narrative for Europe, the cultural task force of the former UE president. Martel has a PhD in Social science and four master degrees in Law, Political science, Philosophy, and Social science. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and taught at Sciences Po-Paris, ESSEC-Paris and at the HEC's MBA (France). He has been invited as a key note speaker in dozens of universities around the world. As a journalist, Frédéric Martel is the producer and anchorman of the weekly radio program "Soft Power" on French National Public Radio (France Culture/Radio France) and the Foreign Affairs Columnist for Slate.fr.

Ann Mbuti

Ann Mbuti is a freelance writer and publicist exploring the mutual influence of art, culture and society. She publishes contributions and articles in magazines, catalogues and broadcasting regularly. At ZCCE, she is responsible for communications.

Coming from the field of media and communication science, Mbuti worked in different areas of the cultural sector after her studies. She co-managed the communications division at Lars Müller Publishers Zurich, worked in content design in scenography, and collaborated on a project basis with institutions such as Cabaret Voltaire, ZAZ, and the Guggenheim Museum New York. As a freelancer, she uses her experience with a focus on strategic communications and advises festivals, publication projects and other mandates.

[Translate to English:] Picture of Ann Mbuti

Valentina Montalto

Valentina Montalto is a culture and creative industries' (CCIs) specialist with +12 year work experience. She currently works as Policy Analyst at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission where she leads the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor, a novel benchmarking tool aimed at assessing the performance of nearly 200 cultural and creative cities across Europe using 29 quantitative indicators and qualitative data.
Previously, she worked as senior consultant at KEA, a leading Brussels-based research and advisory company specialised in the field of CCIs, where she seconded the KEA's founder and director Philippe Kern and co-authored various policy-oriented reports advising EU and local authorities on the role of culture for socio-economic development.

Roman Page

Roman Page is a research fellow at the Zurich Centre for Creative Economies (ZCCE). Prior to ZHdK, he worked as data analyst at the Statistical Office Canton of Zurich, as client & market analyst at UBS and as research fellow at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). Roman Page holds a Master’s degree in social and economic sciences

Stéphane Piqué

Stéphane is leading Accenture’s Industry X practice in Switzerland and is responsible for Industry X Sales in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. His passion is around technologies enabling the Digital Transformation which companies and our society are going through. The Digital Revolution has clearly started and will change everything around us. The way we live, the way we work and the way we interact will never be the same again.
Stéphane studied economics and has over 28 years of technology expertise. Before he joined Accenture six years ago, he was working at Philips, Motorola Solutions and was more than eight years working as independent consultant helping companies and Governments in their IoT/RFID projects deployments. Today, he is acting as go-to-person for all Industry X relevant technologies such as the Internet of Things, PLM, Automation, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented/Virtual Reality, Wearables and Drones.

Andy C Pratt

Professor of Cultural Economy, City, University of London
Andy specializes the analysis of the cultural industries globally. This research has three strands. The first focuses on the social and economic dynamics of clustering and knowledge exchange. The second strand concerns the definition and measurement of employment in the cultural, or creative, industries. The third concerns cultural governance and policy making at the national, regional and urban scales. His current research concerns trans-local cultural production chains, and is funded by EU Horizon 2020 (more information).

[Translate to English:] Picture of Andy Pratt

Antonio Scarponi

Antonio Scarponi (Rimini, Italy, 1974) is an architect and designer, founder of Conceptual Devices, a Zurich based office for resilient design, architecture and urban development.
He studied architecture at Cooper Union, New York and at IUAV, Venice from which he holds a PhD in urban design. He conceives design and architecture as an interdisciplinary cultural tool that can address complex social, political, economic and ecological space-related challenges. His projects take the forms of narrations that engage local communities, industries, agencies.
In the past years, he has been active worldwide in the field of resilient urban strategies with a strong focus on urban agriculture. He designed several soilless urban agricultural projects at different scales of interventions. He is the author of ELIOOO (2014) an instruction manual about how to subvert the IKEA worldwide distribution infrastructure to create a product that does not exists made with found IKEA parts to grow food with hydroponics. This book has been translated in German, Japanese and Russian. Antonio Scarponi is also co-founder of Hic et Nunc (www.hic-et-nunc.me) - a “verain” with the mission to engage design students with fieldwork social design experiences, for which received the best of the year in category design from Hochparterre in 2017.

Josh Siepel

Dr Josh Siepel is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Management at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex Business School. His research focuses on the intersection between entrepreneurship, skills and innovation, with particular reference to the role of creative industries and creative skills in the economy. He currently works with the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC), where he is workstrand lead for Clusters, Innovation and Access to Finance. His research focuses on exploring policy-relevant issues with academic rigour. He was lead author on the PEC's Creative Radar: Exploring the UK's Creative Microclusters report, which utilised a novel combination of scraped web and survey data to document small creative clusters around the UK and has been widely recognised for highlighting the contribution of the UK's smaller creative clusters. His research on the economic benefits of the 'fusion' of creative and technology skills has been cited worldwide, including in parliamentary proceedings in multiple countries and in the World Economic Forum.

Britta Wagemann

Britta Wagemann is a communication designer and cultural activist based in Kassel, Germany. She is working as an Art Director of Communication and Marketing at AMBION – a production company working across Europe and world-wide as an event technology service provider. AMBION is located in Kassel, Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. In the last year digital media and events have taken a whole new meaning. This trend enables new possibilities in creative designing and implementation regarding space, visuals and stories.

Christoph Weckerle

Christoph Weckerle is Director of the Zurich Centre for Creative Economies (ZCCE) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). His cultural policy research focuses on the intersection of art / design and economy / policy / society. He is the lead writer of most creative economies reports in Switzerland. He is a member of the representative board of ELIA (European League of Institutes of the Arts) and the Swiss expert for the Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe. He was awarded the Swiss Design Prize for his research on the creative economies. As a member of the Kuratorium (with the vice-presidents of research of UZH and ETHZ), he refocused the programmes of the Collegium Helveticum, a transdisciplinary lab and think tank operated jointly by the three universities.

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