We're starting off strong with a great group of diverse storytellers. Stay tuned as we work our way to an impressive roster of thirty. Sign up for updates.
President & CEO, Neighborhood Centers, Inc.
Angela Blanchard's pioneering work in asset-based community development focuses on the human, social and cultural strengths of vulnerable populations. As the president and CEO of Houston-based Neighborhood Centers Inc., one of the top 1% of U...
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Media and Wellness Guru
Mallika Chopra is the founder of Intent.com, a website focused on personal, social and global wellness. Her intent is to harness the power of social media to connect people from around the world to improve their own lives, their communities and the...
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Co-founder, Managing Partner, Liquid Comics
Gotham is the co-founder of Liquid Comics (formerly Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation) and serves as the Liquid's, "Producer-in-Residence." He is the author of three books, including the comic book Bulletproof Monk for which he...
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Founder, Futurlogic
Jonathan Cropper is a highly respected media and marketing strategist and entrepreneur. Currently, he is the founder of Futurlogic, a next generation, online education company. Its focus is developing best-in-class online schools in alliance with major...
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Entrepreneur, Angel Investor, and Education Reform Advocate
Angus Davis began his entrepreneurial career taking his grandmother's magazines, clipping articles, stapling them together into new magazines of his own creation and selling them door-to-door. His career as an eight-year-old media aggregator and...
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Author, Co-chairman, Deloitte Center for The Edge
John Hagel used to reach out to people through ideas. Now he does it by letting down his guard every once in a while.
From his position as co-chairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for the Edge, Hagel sees openness as an antidote to the...
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Director of the Havas Media Lab
Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab and author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He also founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer...
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Chief Innovator and Founder, Centre for Global eHealth Innovation
Dr. Jadad is a physician, educator, researcher and public advocate, whose mission is to help improve health and wellness for all, thorough information and communication technologies (ICTs).
He has been called a «human Internet»,as...
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President, Rose Park Advisors
Whitney Johnson dared to disrupt herself when she began her Wall Street career as a secretary, eventually rising to become an Institutional Investor-ranked sell-side equity analyst. She is currently a regular contributor at Harvard Business Review, the...
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Chief Catalyst, Business Innovation Factory
BIF founder and chief catalyst Saul Kaplan doesn’t mince words when it comes to underscoring the difference between creating new ideas and creating new value. In differentiating innovation from ideas and invention, says Kaplan, “it...
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Founder, Chief Scientist, orgnet.com
Valdis is a management consultant, researcher, trainer, author, and the developer of InFlow software for social and organizational network analysis. InFlow maps and measures knowledge exchange, information flow, emergent communities, networks of...
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Co-Founder and President, GlobalGiving Foundation
Mari is the co-founder and president of Global Giving which connects individual and institutional donors directly to social, economic development, and environmental projects around the world. GlobalGiving uses the Internet to create a highly efficient...
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Co-founder and Director, The Big Picture Company
When Dennis "Doc" Littky took the stage at the first BIF Summit, barely a dry eye was left in the audience when he finished his story. Littky is the co-founder and director of Rhode Island's Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical...
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Author and Books Editor, The Huffington Post
Andrew Losowsky creates storytelling experiences. Thus far, he has turned a volcanic eruption into a magazine, a street into a museum, and 35 doorbells into a book. He has lived in Barcelona, Hong Kong, London and Madrid, and he currently lives in New...
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Author, Artist
Fred Mandell has earned a reputation as a highly innovative business leader, author, widely collected sculptor and painter and catalyst for personal change.
He has helped thousands of individuals and their organizations internationally to...
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President, The Willow Creek Association
Jim Mellado is president of The Willow Creek Association, responsible for providing overall leadership to staff and volunteers, helping accomplish WCA's purpose of maximizing the life-transformation effectiveness of local churches. He has been with...
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Founder, Monitor Talent
Chris's mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as entrepreneur, executive, consultant, author, and as leader of a think tank.
His fourth book, Standing on the Sun, will be published by...
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Executive Vice President, Global Innovation, WD-40 Company
Mr. Milner leads Team Tomorrow, the group charged with innovation and extension of current and new brands. The current brand portfolio is: WD-40, LAVA, 3-IN-ONE, X-14, 200FLUSHES, SPOT SHOT, CARPET FRESH in the USA, 1001 in the UK and SOLVOL in...
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Alpinist
Matthew Moniz is one of Colorado’s most accomplished young alpinists, having climbed four of the seven summits and completed all US High Points by the age of 12. Matt was recently named National Geographic Adventurer of the Year for 2010. A...
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Chief of Party, USAID Global Broadband and Innovations Alliance
Erin Mote has over a decade of experience forging alliances with private corporations, NGOS and governments to drive the development of corporate strategies that promote a double bottom line of profit and social good including work with Diageo, Chevron...
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Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Health Leads
In 1996, during her sophomore year at Harvard College, Rebecca Onie co-founded Health Leads (formerly Project HEALTH) with Dr. Barry Zuckerman, Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center.
Rebecca served as Executive Director of Health Leads...
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Author, "Drive", "A Whole New Mind"
Dan Pink is the author of four provocative, bestselling books on the changing world of work.
In his latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink shows us that the secret to high performance and satisfaction in...
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Professor, Stanford University; Behavioral Scientist, Author, Proponent of Interactive Gaming & Virtual Worlds in the Workplace
Byron is the Paul C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and is Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industry program, Media X....
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Violist, violinist, music educator and 2010 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Community Musicworks
Sebastian Ruth is the founder of Community Musicworks and a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. With start-up funding from the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University, Community Musicworks began modestly in 1997 with 15 violin students. Today, CMW is...
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President, Babson College
Len Schlesinger says that the past few years as the president of Babson College in Massachusetts has been "an absolute gas." The huge smile and breathless pace he brings to the position are only outmatched by the tenacity with which he...
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Founder, UnCollege and Thiel Fellow
Dale J. Stephens brings a unique perspective on the future of education, talent, and innovation. At 19, Dale leads UnCollege, a social movement that applies the methods of unschooling—the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he...
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Fine Art Photographer, L.R.P.S
Raised behind the Iron Curtain, Eva Koleva Timothy learned to internalize a sense of creative freedom and enthusiasm in a very bleak and oppressive environment. Yet her love for the West, its history and culture kept a dream alive that she would...
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Author, Artist, Screenwriter, "The Polar Express"
Parents, educators, and children have been known to develop a kind of obsession with the books of Chris Van Allsburg. His work appeals to diverse audiences because it is neither simplistic nor formulaic. Van Allsburg doesn't write with an eye...
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Thomas J. Watson, Jr., University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science, Brown University
Andries van Dam (Andy) has been on Brown's faculty since 1965, and was one of the Computer Science Department's co-founders and its first Chairman, from 1979 to 1985. He was a Principal Investigator and was the Director from 1996-1998 in the...
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Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo!
Duncan is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. As director of the Human Social Dynamics group, Duncan explores the interplay between individual-level behavior (e.g. how people make decisions about what music they like, which dates to go...
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Chief Mobilization Officer & Managing Director, Citizen Schools
John is an activist, athlete, change agent, connector, educator, idea generator, parent, photographer, social entrepreneur, technologist and founding member and current Chief Mobilizing Officer of Citizen Schools. Over the past 17 years at Citizen...
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Author, Information Architect
Richard Saul Wurman likes to simplify things to initials and numerals: TED is the Technology Entertainment Design conference he created; TUB is The Understanding Business, a company Wurman founded to capitalize on his theories of knowledge.
...
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