Innovation Dialogue 5 - The Change Challenge

Jacqueline Linke currently works as the Manager of Innovation & Strategy for Sydney Trains where she is responsible for designing and delivering an enterprise wide strategy aligned with Transport for New South Wales to spur innovation into every corner of the organisation.

Jacqueline's empowering approach to building culture through developing leaders and realising individuals’ potential, comes from years of coaching and facilitation in the public and private sector in all aspects of soft skills behavioural training, including customer service, stakeholder management, communication skills, cognitive agility, emotional intelligence, storytelling, presentation skills, creative thinking, negotiation skills, influencing and leadership skills.

Shilpa Bhandarkar is the Head of Innovation for Linklaters, responsible for catalysing change and innovation at the Firm. Shilpa started her career as a project finance lawyer but her interest in technology and entrepreneurship led her to found, build and sell a mobile app company as well as grow a LegalTech start-up before re-joining Linklaters in her current role. 

Her responsibilities as the Head of Innovation include fostering a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship within the firm, leading the firm’s strategy on emerging areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Data, Blockchain and Smart Contracts, and engaging with legal tech start-ups and academia to stay at the forefront of legal sector developments and thought leadership.

As SVP of Innovation at Thomson Reuters, Katherine Manuel is helping the company transition from an international holding company to a global innovator creating partnerships and growth opportunities for its customers, employees and shareholders.

Prior to this role, Katherine was a member of the Corporate Strategy team, where she worked with corporate leadership to create a long-term strategy based on market understanding and access to customers and products.

Katherine has been with Thomson Reuters for nearly 11 years, holding senior positions within both the Legal and Tax & Accounting businesses as well as leading Technology Strategy & Enterprise Architecture for Healthcare & Science. From there, she joined the Office of the CEO, where she worked on various projects within the News division and the company-wide Transformation program.

Before joining Thomson Reuters, Katherine worked for Accenture, focusing on the Media, Entertainment and Telecom industries. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Davidson College and a Masters of Business Administration from Duke University. She sits on the Advisory Boards of Duke University’s The Fuqua School of Business’ Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, as well as SOAR Triangle, a non-profit established to support women-led startups in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina.

Gavin James is Head of Digital Adoption and Innovation at the Department for Transport. Gavin started his career as a policy professional in 2008. His passion for learning has taken him to diverse areas, including climate change strategy, London Olympics coordination and EU transport law. More recently he was responsible for telecoms, technology and data on the railway. It was in this role that he saw the impact that a few talented technologists can have when given the freedom to experiment. As a result he founded the DfT Lab, an innovation team with DfT. The Lab is working to prototype and develop technologies to make DfT the world leader in the governance of transport. Gavin is also proud to work at DfT, one of The Times Top 50 Employers for Women 2017 and Business in the Community's Best Employers for Race and an accredited Disability Confident Leader.

John Oswald is a influential thought leader and pioneer of Business Design, a profession aimed at putting people at the centre of Design, Technology and Strategy so businesses can launch products and services that are meaningful, and evolve internally to become amazing places to work.

As Global Principal Advisory for digital innovation consultancy Futurice, John heads up a 40-strong European team of multi-disciplinary consultants who collectively identify the challenges clients will face in the near future and coach them on how to best to achieve business impact and organisational evolution as they launch new services or innovate in new ways.  

In addition to his global remit, John plays a key role in supporting Futurice’s client activity in London where he is also responsible for creating new relationships for Futurice with design and business-focused academic institutions.

John was previously Business Design Director at Fjord where he pioneered and grew Fjord’s Business Design unit across 21 studios globally, and was responsible for some of Fjord’s most impactful work.

As part of his global role, John specialises in applying keenly applied insights to breaking news stories about the digital economy. He has strong views about the “right kind of capitalism” and the need for a new ethical code to replace Silicon Valley’s discredited “ fail fast and break things” mantra. As a writer and commentator, John is in high demand from titles ranging from Management Today, Venturebeat, Raconteur and Huffington Post for his trenchant views on where brands such as Uber and Facebook are going wrong. He was recently interviewed by CNBC on whether regulation is coming for Facebook. John speaks regularly at conferences in the UK and Europe and headlined a session at CXC 2017 (Conference on Customer experience in Financial Services) “Customer Experience: Are We Getting I All Wrong?”