David Cano holds MSc in Mechanical Engineering, post graduate studies in Management of Innovation and Technology Policy and Executive MBA program at IESE. He David has an extensive experience in management, development and operation of the innovation process primarily on industrial, ICT and healthcare sectors. Trained in general management and innovation in international centres of excellence, highlights his experience identifying business opportunities, feasibility analysis, fundraising both national and European level and its later product/service commercialization. Passionate about teaching, participates in various related innovation management and entrepreneurship program with a clear market orientation what motivates him to establish his own star-up company in the medical sector.
Ray Garcia (US)
Ray Garcia is the managing director of Buoyant Capital, a global peer advisory think-tank addressing the growth challenges of small to medium sized enterprises. The firm coordinates its team of experts to help its clients improve competitiveness through talent management, global market expansion partnership access, technology asset management, capital investment and restructuring. Buoyant Capital was founded in 2000 in New York City and has helped launch several start-up companies and works as an advisor to company founders, CEO’s, and their investors. Ray has over 20 years of experience as a technology entrepreneur, as company CTO co-founder, for four venture-backed companies. Since 2015 he is serving as a business expert to EU Commission Horizon 2020 SME innovation instrument where he is evaluating commercialization grant proposals of technology ventures and coaching company executives who have received grant funding.
Angel Alba (ES)
Angel is a consultant specialist in strategic innovation and accelerating innovation processes and projects. Innovation coach of the European Commission for the SME Instrument.
He has more than 20,000 hours of experience in innovation projects. He worked at Procter & Gamble for 7 years and after that he worked as Managing Director of the first Tech Center of KIBS in ES. In 2012 he launched his own consultancy start-up, called Innolandia.es, achiving +140 clients in 7 countries in 4 years.
He is certified innovation consultant and professor for the EOI Foundation (under the Ministry of Industry), working in several innovation and entrepreneurships projects and courses.
He is specialist in helping organizations and entrepreneurs to innovate sustainable and continuously and in designing new products and services with agile tools such as Design Thinking and Lean Start-up.
Orchidea Innovations (FI)
Orchidea Innovations is leading software company in the field on innovation. They help their customers to systemize and involve the whole organization in innovation. Orchidea SaaS platform enables employees, customers and partners to participate in innovation. Their software and expertise help the customers to accelerate innovation which leads to more profitable business.
Orchidea was founded in 2002 assist and catalyze in-person ideation. Since 2006 they have focused on systemization and acceleration of employee driven innovation. They codevelop software with their customer which involves employees, customers and partners in development of products, services and process improvements.
Jari Kaivo-oja (FI)
Mr Jari Kaivo-oja is an expert in the field of foresight and innovation management. He is Research Director at Finland Futures Research Centre, at TSE of University of Turku. He is adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki (Faculty of Science) and at the University of Lapland (Faculty of Social Sciences). He has worked in various foresight research projects for the European Commission (FP 6, FP 7, and Horizon 2020), European Parliament, European Foundation, Nordic Innovation Centre, Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation and the Academy of Finland. He is respected research fellow in European science forums, being among other things, Skłodowska-Curie science program´s evaluator in 2016 and evaluator of various EU research programmes.