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About A.G. Lafley:
As the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, A.G. Lafley is a world renowned leader in innovation. He began at Proctor and Gamble in 1977, and was chosen as CEO in 2000. He inherited a struggling company that was then and still is adapting to a new global business unit. He saw one of the only ways to get out of trouble was to focus on innovation in his company. A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan have co-written “The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation”.

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About Tom Davenport:
Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, where he also leads the Process Management and Working Knowledge Research Centers. His books and articles on business process reengineering, knowledge management, attention management, knowledge worker productivity, and analytical competition helped to establish each of those business ideas. His website is tomdavenport.com.

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About Gavin Newsom:
Gavin Newsom was born October 10, 1967 to the Honorable Judge William Newsom and Tessa Newsom. He grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Santa Clara University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. In 2005, Newsom earned an honorable mention as one of Time Magazine’s Best Big City Mayors and was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders.

As San Francisco’s youngest mayor in 100 years, Gavin Newsom has brought fresh ideas and renewed energy to the City and County. He has earned a reputation as an innovator on issues ranging from homelessness to the environment, healthcare to education.

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About Amy Smith:
Mechanical engineer Amy Smith’s approach to problem-solving in developing nations is refreshingly common-sense: Invent cheap, low-tech devices that use local resources, so communities can reproduce her efforts and ultimately help themselves. Smith, working with her students at MIT, has come up with several useful tools, including an incubator that stays warm without electricity, a simple grain mill, and a tool that converts farm waste into cleaner-burning charcoal.

The inventions have earned Smith three prestigious prizes: the B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, the MIT-Lemelson Prize, and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Her course, “Design for Developing Countries,” is a pioneer in bringing humanitarian design into the curriculum of major institutions. Going forward, the former Peace Corps volunteer strives to do much more, bringing her inventiveness and boundless energy to bear on some of the world’s most persistent problems.

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About Douglas Merrill:
Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry. Dr. Eric Schmidt joined Google as chairman and chief executive officer in 2001.

Formerly a senior vice president at Charles Schwab; worked at Price Waterhouse and the RAND Corp.; ran a small consulting company in Southwest Asia; taught at Northwestern; has a doctorate in psychology at Princeton.

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About Robin Chase:
If she weren’t a proven start-up entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, some dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. Or if she weren’t such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a businesswoman only. Ultimately, the best way to understand Chase is simply as a remarkable innovator.

Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on founding Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key system and Internet billing, members pick up Zipcars at myriad locations anytime they want one. The idea is at once ordinary and highly sophisticated, with powerful technologies applied to tasks as prosaic as grocery shopping. But the result couldn’t be more straightforward: fewer cars, less carbon.

Since its founding, Zipcar has doubled in size every year, making Chase’s biggest ideas and her latest company, GoLoco, look mighty promising.

She spends the first half of the video describing how important mobile phones have become to us and that they have become so ubiquitous that a third of the global population owns one. The second half is spent on the challenges facing cellphones today and how new usage models will solve social problems that we as humans have always had to deal with.

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About Younghee Jung:
Younghee Jung is senior interaction designer in Nokia’s User Experience unit. In Nokia, Younghee specializes in developing future product concepts, incubating the product concepts before they are ‘adopted’ in the productization line, and creating evolutionary roadmaps of core applications of mobile phones. Her past endeavours include the incubation research for Nokia Lifeblog and she is currently working on creating the vision for mobile phonebook application. Her passion is to learn and understand various cultures of humanity and make contribution to enrich them via design. She studied interaction design at Carnegie Mellon University as a Fulbright scholar, and industrial design at KAIST, South Korea.

About Dr. Safi R. Bahcall:
Dr. Safi R. Bahcall is the Founder, Chief Executive Officer, President, and Director at Synta Pharmaceuticals, a drug discovery and development company with three drugs entering clinical trials for cancer and autoimmune diseases. He is also an Advisor at SCIUS Capital Group, Investment Arm. Mr. Bahcall is a former McKinsey & Co. Consultant with more than 15 years experience.

Synta Pharmaceuticals Corp. is a biopharmaceutical company, focuses on discovering, developing, and commercializing small molecule drugs to extend and enhance the lives of patients with severe medical conditions, including cancer and chronic inflammatory diseases. The company’s product pipeline primarily includes STA-4783, a Phase IIb clinical trial for the treatment of metastatic melanoma, as well as in Phase IIb clinical trial for the treatment of additional cancers. The company’s drug candidates also include, Apilimod (STA-5326), a Phase IIa clinical trial in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, as well as sponsoring a Phase IIa clinical trial in patients with common variable immunodeficiency (CVID). In addition, the company develops STA-9090 and STA-9584, which are in preclinical development; and Oral CRAC ion channel inhibitor program that is in the lead optimization stage for the treatment of autoimmune diseases. The company, formerly known as Neutra Pharmaceuticals Corp., was incorporated in 2000 and is based in Lexington, Massachusetts.

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About Malcolm Gladwell:
Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises — counterintuitive truths discovered by clever researchers, obscure historians, and ordinary people observing the world. In his first year as a staff writer at the “New Yorker in 1996, he captivated readers with an article titled “The Tipping Point,” which grappled with a mysterious sudden drop in New York City crime, by applying the principles of epidemiology to policing. “The Tipping Point” ultimately became a book and has remained on the New York Times best-seller lists for years.

Meanwhile, Gladwell has gone on to explore similar mismatches — mammography and fighter jets (it’s all about seeing), pit bulls and racial profiling, Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma — writing cross-disciplinary articles that illuminate hidden facts about group behavior, business and individual selves. Gladwell began 2007 with a controversial look at the Enron case, distinct from all the reportage that’s come before.

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About James Surowiecki:
James Surowiecki is the foremost authority on how to harness the collective wisdom of your organization for competitive advantage. He has written a well-received book on the theory and practice of “The Wisdom of Crowds—Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few And How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies And Nations”.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, Jim describes systematic ways to organize and aggregate the intelligence available in your organization in order to arrive at superior decisions—often better than those that individuals would make, even if they are ‘experts’.

The book and Jim’s presentations based on the book are full of insights into how groups operate that are invaluable to business leaders. He also offers practical methods, tailored to his audience, for leveraging people and technology to learn what you need to know and make decisions that really serve the organization’s goals.

Jim writes a twice-monthly financial column for The New Yorker that is typically pegged to current events and incorporates the kind of insights from economics, sociology, and business history that make The Wisdom of Crowds so valuable.

He has written for a broad range of other publications on a wide variety of topics. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal and other major publications. He wrote “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine, and was a contributing editor at Fortune.

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About Dean Kamen:
Dean Kamen is an innovator, but not just of things. He hopes to revolutionize attitudes, quality of life, awareness. While an undergraduate, he developed the first portable infusion device, which delivers drug treatments that once required round-the-clock hospital care. And, through his DEKA Research and Development, which he cofounded in 1982, he developed a portable dialysis machine, a vascular stent, and the iBOT — a motorized wheelchair that climbs stairs (Stephen Colbert took one for a spin).

Yes, he’s a college dropout, but he’s a huge believer in education, and in 1989 established the nonprofit FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) to inspire teenagers to pursue careers in science. FIRST sponsors lively annual competitions, where students form teams to create the best robot.

His focus now is on off-grid electricity and water purification for developing countries; another recent project, is a prosthetic arm for maimed soldiers. He’s also working on a power source for the wonderful Think car. And, with more funding in the works, we haven’t seen the last of the Segway.

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About Sergey Brin and Larry Page:
Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Google: the technology, the company, the verb. How did their search business, relatively late to the game, come to rule the Web?

The answer might be found in the personalities of the Google founders. Brin and Page met in grad school at Stanford in the mid-’90s, and in 1996 started working on a search technology based on a new idea: that relevant results come from context. Their technology analyzed the number of times a given website was linked to by other sites — assuming that the more links, the more relevant the site — and ranked sites accordingly. In 1998, they opened Google in a garage-office in Menlo Park. In 1999 their software left beta and started its steady rise to web domination.

But technology alone doesn’t account for Google’s breakaway success. In fact, Google’s approach to site design and advertising may have been more radical than the technology itself: In an era when search engines were super-saturated with sponsor messages, Google broke the mold with their famously friendly and simple interface. Paid links were clearly identfied; no pop-windows or banner ads were used; the homepage offered little more than their whimsical logo and a single search box. Customers loved it.

Brin and Page’s innovation-friendly office culture (beyond the famous free food, there’s the company’s “20 Percent Time,” which encourages engineers to spend a fifth of their time pursuing whatever projects ignite their interest) has created fertile ground for spectacular successes beyond search, including AdSense/AdWords, Google News, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Gmail. The company’s belief in clean design and ethical ad sales, and its corporate philosophy — often simply stated as “Don’t be evil” — continue to set the company apart.

In 2004, Brin and Page launched the company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, focused on solving worldwide problems relating to poverty, energy and the environment.

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About Ray Kurzweil:
Inventor, entrepreneur, visionary, Ray Kurzweil’s accomplishments read as a startling series of firsts — a litany of technological breakthroughs we’ve come to take for granted. Kurzweil invented the first optical character recognition (OCR) software for transforming the written word into data, the first print-to-speech software for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and many electronic instruments.

Yet his impact as a futurist and philosopher is no less significant. In his best-selling books, which include The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil depicts in detail a portrait of the human condition over the next few decades, as accelerating technologies forever blur the line between human and machine.

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About Malcolm Gladwell:
Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises — counterintuitive truths discovered by clever researchers, obscure historians, and ordinary people observing the world. In his first year as a staff writer at the “New Yorker in 1996, he captivated readers with an article titled “The Tipping Point,” which grappled with a mysterious sudden drop in New York City crime, by applying the principles of epidemiology to policing. “The Tipping Point” ultimately became a book and has remained on the New York Times best-seller lists for years.

Meanwhile, Gladwell has gone on to explore similar mismatches — mammography and fighter jets (it’s all about seeing), pit bulls and racial profiling, Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma — writing cross-disciplinary articles that illuminate hidden facts about group behavior, business and individual selves. Gladwell began 2007 with a controversial look at the Enron case, distinct from all the reportage that’s come before.

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About Saul Griffith:
Innovator and inventor Saul Griffith has a uniquely open approach to problem solving. Whether he’s devising a way to slash the cost of prescription eyeglasses or teaching science through cartoons, Griffith makes things and then shares his ideas with the world.

A proponent of open-source information, he established Instructables, an open website showing how to make an array of incredible objects. His think-tank design firm, Squid Labs, invents myriad new devices and materials — such as a “smart” rope that senses its load, or a machine for making low-cost eyeglass lenses through a process inspired by a water droplet. He’s fascinated with materials that assemble themselves, and with taking advantage of those properties to make things quickly and cheaply.

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About Jeff Bezos:
Jeff Bezos didn’t invent online shopping, but he almost single-handedly turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. His Amazon.com began as a bookstore in 1994, and quickly expanded into dozens of product categories, forcing the world’s biggest retailers to rethink their business models, and ultimately changing the way people shop.

But Amazon.com isn’t just an internet success story. It’s the standard by which all web businesses are now judged — if not by their shareholders, then by their customers. Amazon set a high bar for reliability and customer service, and also introduced a wide range of online retail conventions — from user reviews and one-click shopping to the tab interface and shopping cart icon — so commonplace we no longer think of them as once having been innovations.

When the Internet bubble burst, Amazon.com took a hit with the other e-commerce pioneers, but the fundamentally sound company hung tough. It now sells more than $8 billion a year of goods, profitably, and its technology will influence the changes to business and media that will come next. Bezos, meanwhile, is one of the few early Web CEOs who still run the companies they founded. Outside of his work with Amazon, he recently founded Blue Origin, a space-flight startup.

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With every passing day, that kind of safe, predictable business culture is more passé. Like it or not, it’s self-perpetuating, a prescription for more of the same. In our global, hyper-competitive business world of the 21st century, we know that sameness is a prescription for stagnation, or worse.

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Innovate to compete. That’s the current mantra. Creativity is deemed the core competence for thriving organizations. New products, new services, new business models. That’s the way to grow. Agility, flexibility and responsiveness to customers and markets are the characteristics of leading companies.

But building an innovative culture is a very tall order. Why? Because encouraging unconventional thinking is simply that: counter-intuitive, “not the way we do things around here.”

Innovation has its roots in an attitude that permeates a company. It’s openness to unexpected and unsettling ideas – from the executive suite to the plant floor. Even more essential, it’s willingness to modify old habits and maybe rock the boat. It demands readiness to change.

Innovation starts on the inside, in the corporate mindset. And where it takes hold, companies are apt to adjust and grow and look distinctly different on the outside, too.