BIG BANG DISRUPTION
What does a food fight among Late Renaissance art historians tell us about the changing nature of technological innovation? Larry Downes, co-author of the forthcoming book, “Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation,” will describe the new model for market disruption, one based on low-cost experimentation, the combining of off-the-shelf component parts, and collaboration with early users on everything from design to funding. When new products enter the market better, cheaper and more customized than those with which they compete, the result for incumbents can be deadly.
About our speaker.
Larry Downes is coauthor of the new book BIG BANG DISRUPTION: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation. He is an Internet industry analyst and author on the impact of disruptive technologies on business and policy. His first book, Unleashing the Killer App, was one of the biggest business bestsellers of the early 2000s. He is a columnist for Forbes and CNET and writes regularly for other publications including USA Today and the Harvard Business Review. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Anita Moorjani has become something of an international sensation since her book “Dying to be Me” hit the New York Times bestsellers list only two weeks after its release in March, 2012. She had experienced what most people never have; she “crossed over,” and came back to share what she learned. Her remarkable NDE (Near-death experience) and subsequent healing from end-stage cancer is one of the most amazing cases ever recorded. Doctors had given her mere hours to live when she arrived at the hospital in a coma on the morning of February 2, 2006. Unable to move, and in a deep coma as the result of the cancer that had ravaged her body for nearly four years, Anita entered another dimension, where she experienced great clarity and understanding of her life and purpose here on earth, and was given a choice of whether to return to life or continue on into death. Anita chose to return to life when she realized that “heaven” is a state, not a place. This subsequently resulted in a remarkable and complete recovery of her health within days of her return.
About our speaker:
Pasha Sadri is a technologist, best known for creating Yahoo! Pipes, described by Tim O’Reilly as a “milestone in the history of the Internet”. He is a co-founder of Polyvore, a leading social commerce company. He grew up in Iran, playing with Legos, electronics and writing programs on a C64.
Eren Bali is the CEO and co-founder of Udemy, a startup that aims to democratize educations by allowing anybody to teach and learn online. Udemy, started in late 2010, reached over 5000 courses and a total of 500,000 students by late 2012. This led the company to raise a total of $16 from investors in Silicon Valley and New York. Prior to Udemy, Eren worked at SpeedDate as a founding engineer and Director of Engineering while the company grew form 0 to 15 million users in 3 years and raised more than $14M. Eren graduated from METU (Turkey) with a degree in Computer Science and a double major degree in Mathematics. He won several awards in Mathematics, Physics and CS including a 2nd position in International Mathematical Olympiads.
Prasad is the CEO of the Kaipa Group in California and works with companies and senior executives in the areas of innovation, leadership development and coaching. He is a senior research fellow and a visiting professor at Indian School of Business (ISB) and was the founding Executive Director of the Center for Leadership, Innovation and Change (CLIC) and raised multi-million dollar funding to initiate two research cells–SBI Cell for Public Leadership and Biocon Cell for Innovation Management in CLIC. Core themes for Prasad’s research are wisdom leadership, Indian models of innovation and leadership, affordable innovation, transformational leadership and mental models. He was a Smith Richardson Visiting Fellow at Center for Creative Leadership between 2010-2011 and is currently an advisor to Business FAC of Fetzer Institute. Prasad taught executive education programs organized by INSEAD, LBS, Tuck and IIM Bangalore in addition to ISB.
Patrick is the founder and CEO of Ark.com, a modern people search engine. Patrick built his first search engine while an undergraduate at Berkeley because he was tired of using Alta Vista to find academic articles. During his Ph.D., he created a search platform that captures and indexes everything said on broadcast television, in an effort to see how social media correlates to television. Patrick has published numerous computer science articles with the IEEE and ACM, as well as having ten years of industry experience.
Nilofer Merchant has gone from admin to CEO to board member of a NASDAQ-traded company along her 20 year career, gathering monikers such as “the Jane Bond of Innovation” along the way for her ability to guide Fortune 500 and startup companies through impossible odds.