Innov8rs Lisbon (2-3 May 2023)

Combating the climate crisis is one of humanity’s biggest collective undertakings, and many businesses responded in the last decade with pledges. However, it’s become clear that very few corporations will meet their own climate and sustainability goals. To everyone’s detriment.

Christian will speak to the hardest part of fighting climate change: the how. What can CIOs and Heads of Innovation do – fast, and at scale – to reverse the damage we’ve already done to our planet? How do you pull out all the stops to innovate with purpose, fund technologies that halt global warming, and help future-proof your own business at the same time?

Christian is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded several successful startups, including Reflex Aerospace — the first venture-backed satellite manufacturer in Europe, a virtual reality startup that was acquired by booking.com, and Skyroads — an open digital operations platform for the urban air mobility market. He was also CEO of UN:IO Enterprise GmbH, Europe’s first low latency and high bandwidth satellite mega constellation.

Before joining Mach49, Christian served as Head of Airbus Scale — Airbus’ central innovation unit — where he drove all of the company’s internal and external innovation activities. He also served as Managing Director of Wayra Germany — Telefónica’s CVC arm — where he oversaw the strategic direction of the organization and managed the selection of and investment in startups to be integrated into Telefónica’s portfolio.

Christian has created and advised over 20 incubator and accelerator programs across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria and holds board seats at several high-tech, high-growth startups across Europe. As Co-Founder and Director of TechFounders — a high-tech hardware accelerator based in Munich — he was responsible for the development of over 50 high-tech startups.

Born in Brazil and raised in Mexico, Christian holds degrees in international business administration and economics from the Leopold-Franzens University in Innsbruck, the University of New Orleans, and the University of Barcelona. He now lives in Barcelona with his wife and two children, and enjoys surfing the European swells in his free time.

Disruption is no longer a possibility we try to avoid, it’s an inevitability that we must win.

Only the Future-Driven Organization will survive and thrive, innovating at speed and scale and building an innovation metabolism that goes deep into it’s DNA.

Firestarter. Agent Provocateur. Futurecaster.

Strategist, innovation manager, professor, researcher, public speaker, mentor and entrepreneur.

At Nova School of Business and Economics Rui is the Executive Director of the Innovation Ecosystem, orchestrating an outstanding community of innovators for a better sustainable future. He is also a Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the school.

The global economic outlook for 2023 is not great. This has resulted in companies cutting their budgets across the board. We have been in conversation with several innovation teams whose budgets are getting cut. And the question from these teams is the same – how do we accomplish our innovation goals for 2023 when our budget has been reduced?

In this keynote, Tendayi Viki will address how to keep innovating during a crisis. Companies that continue to invest in innovation during a crisis experience superior growth and performance post-crisis. The important thing to do during a crisis is to prune your innovation portfolio and focus on the innovation projects that are most likely to have an impact. Session participants will learn how to choose the right projects to keep investing in, so they can deliver value for their organizations.

Tendayi Viki is an author and corporate innovation expert. As Associate Partner at Strategyzer, he helps companies build their capabilities to innovate for the future while managing their core business. He has written three books; Pirates In The Navy, The Corporate Startup and The Lean Product Lifecycle. He previously served as Director of Product Lifecycle at Pearson, where he co-developed an innovation framework that won the Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York. Tendayi was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2021 and was named on the Thinkers50 2018 Radar List for emerging management thinkers to watch. He is also a regular contributor at Forbes.