Event
Global Innovation Forum
Virtual Edition 2.0
Date | September 28-30, 2021 |
Location | Online |
Find out more | https://giflondon.com |
Global Innovation Forum (GIF) brings together some of the world’s most influential innovation leaders to share business insights and personal stories.
Back for its second virtual edition, GIFLondon invites you to “Re-imagine the future” through talks, breakout sessions, Q&As, tours and one-to-one meets – all designed to help you rethink your purpose and use the power of innovation to build a better future for communities, businesses and the planet.
Our innovation leads will be hosting sessions spanning diverse topics with speakers from a range of industries.
Our sessions
Tuesday,
September 28
10:00am | Shaping the future of cities
Martha Hodgson, our Senior Insight & Strategy Consultant, joins Hanna Harris, Chief Design Officer at City of Helsinki, to discuss the Finnish capital’s vision to become “the most functional city in the world” through urban innovation and digitization.
12:00pm | Circular economy: Why should we care?
Pari Gaikwad, our Head of Digital, joins Thijs Maartens, Sustainability & Circular Economy Lead at Philips, and Charissa Rujanavech, Circular Economy Principal at Amazon, to explore how innovators can think about circularity across a product or service’s life cycle.
2:15pm | Partnership for innovation
Ben Strutt, our Director of Design & FEI, joins Phil Taylor, Open Innovation Lead at Bayer Crop Science, and Karen Hackney, Head of External Innovation & Partnering at Bayer Consumer Health, to discuss the benefits of partnering for innovation.
Wednesday,
September 29
12:00pm | Driving the future
James Harmer, our Planning & Innovation Strategy Leader, joins Julia Pallé, Sustainability Director at Formula E, and Lucas Di Grassi, Formula E 2017 World Champion, to learn how innovation in motorsport is changing the way we think about electric vehicles and shaping new driving experiences.
4:30pm | Driving transformative social innovation
Ben Strutt joins Carina Wong, Senior Advisor, Innovation & Scale at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to discuss transformative social innovation, focussing on education, with widely applicable lessons on insight, inclusion and scale.
Thursday,
September 30
10:30am | Sextech and innovation
Jessica Platt, our Associate Insights Researcher, joins Bryony Cole, Founder at Sextech School, to learn about sextech’s role in complementing intimate pleasure and emotional connection.
3:30pm | Envisioning the future of food
James Harmer joins Josh Tetrick, Co-founder & CEO at Eat Just, to discuss shifting the way we think about producing and using food.
Our speakers

Ben Strutt | Director of Design & FEI
As a CDP Partner and leader of our design and front-end innovation activities, Ben’s perspectives on innovation draw on 20 years of global insight and end-to-end product development experience working with businesses from start-ups to some of the best-known consumer goods and healthcare brands in the world.

Jessica Platt | Associate Insights Researcher
Jessica drives user-centered innovation in FMCG, consumer technology and diagnostics. She draws on her background in anthropology, combining scientific knowledge with an understanding of human behavior to ensure the products and services we develop meet the needs of their users. Jessica incorporates ethnographic methodologies into qualitative and quantitative research to ensure diverse voices are included in the innovation process and deliver innovations that support health and wellbeing.

James Harmer | Planning & Innovation Strategy Leader
James leads insight and innovation projects for major food and beverage industry clients, with responsibility for ‘joining the dots’ between consumer needs, strategic opportunity, and breakthrough branded-packaging innovation. With a portfolio spanning more than 25 years of partnership with global FMCG companies, including Unilever, Nestle and PepsiCo, James helps our clients unlock innovation opportunity in a sustainable circular economy.

Pari Gaikwad | Head of Digital
Pari leads our digital offering, developing strategies and practical implementation to maximize the commercial opportunities from emerging digital services and technology. With digital technologies poised to revolutionize patient care and improve millions of lives, Pari’s focus is on medical therapy, drug delivery and diagnostics – sectors where an effective digital strategy can unlock huge value for both patients and healthcare providers.

Martha Hodgson | Senior Insight & Strategy Consultant
Martha’s focused on helping our clients become truly customer-centric, drawing on her wealth of experience creating insight programs and conducting research for Innovation, from client and consultancy standpoints. She loves working in a multidisciplinary team, where effective insight translation leads to successful product and service innovation.