An intuitive, creative and ‘out of the box’ visual marketing director who excels at creating visual and marketing stimulus that helps clients comprehend and build their vision while captivating their audience through enriched creative concepts. Result oriented with a proven track record of success and innovative concepts and plans.

Charley has over 40 years of experience in finance, marketing, and operations. He was one of the founders of Adayana, Inc. He served in a number of roles at Adayana, including corporate secretary, Chief Financial Officer, and VP of Strategic Finance. Prior to Adayana, Charley worked at LearningByte International, an e-learning Company where he was Vice President of Pricing, Analysis, and Contracts. Prior to joining LearningByte, Charley worked for over 20 years at National Car Rental Systems, Inc., where he held such positions as Director of Financial Analysis, Vice President of Strategic Analysis, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis and Corporate Economist. Charley holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and an MBA in Finance and Computer Systems from the William E. Simon Graduate School of Management at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY.

Denis Hauptly is a consultant on innovation and on online information issues and President of Information Innovators Group. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Courtroom Connect and of the American Arbitration Association and a member of the Board of Advisors of Exemplify. He has previously served as Chief Innovation Officer at Thomson Reuters Global Resources (Switzerland), Vice President, New Product Development at Thomson West, Vice President Content at Thomson Global Resources and Vice President, Technology Product Development at Thomson West in which position he led the design and development of westlaw.com and managed the expansion of the Westlaw platform into the UK, Canada, Germany and Australia as well as supporting the extension into tax information. He is the author of five books including Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products (AMACOM, 2007). His books have been awarded an America Library Association Notable Book designation among other awards and he is the recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Writing on the Constitution. A native of New Jersey, he is a graduate of St. Michael’s College in American Studies and has a law degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Diane is a strategic leader who is fascinated by culture – how we work together, how we use technology, and how we learn from each other. She focuses on team building and direct management, with an emphasis on how the culture of an organization affects the success of a project. Diane’s expertise is in finding a need, creating a vision, and catalysing a change. She graduated from MIT Executive MBA Class of 2014. She is now focusing on strengthening entrepreneurship in Minnesota, through connections with communities, non-profits, policymakers, innovation leaders, and networks.

Beth has more than 13 years of experience in human centred thinking and design. She has collected a wealth of experience working in the marketing departments of large corporations such as Disney, UnitedHealth Group and Allianz, as well as working on brands like BMW, Sony and The Islands of the Bahamas for advertising agency, Fallon. She is well versed in B2B and B2C marketing and advertising as well as branding, design, creative direction, advertising, ideation and strategic thinking across digital, traditional and non-traditional mediums. She recently joined BlueSpire to help drive innovation and human-centred thinking into the core of the organization and into the solutions that are developed for clients.

Dr. Evan Blumer has worked for more than 25 years to integrate wildlife, habitat and energy conservation strategies with new, sustainable development models. For the majority of his career, Dr. Blumer has worked as a Wildlife Veterinarian and Conservation Biologist. With extensive “field experience” in more than 20 countries, and a pioneering role in the development of large-scale “Conservation Centers”, Blumer has endeavored to bridge the gap between traditional zoological facilities and free-ranging populations of the planet’s most threatened wildlife species.

Faiyaz is a seasoned technocrat handling Program/Product Management successfully and with proven ability to lead diverse teams of professionals to new level of success in variety of highly competitive industries, cutting-edge markets and fast-paced environment. With more than 17 years of experience backed by strong technical skills and business acumen has proven ability to successfully analyse an organization’s critical business requirements, identify deficiencies and potential opportunities, and develop innovative and cost-effective solutions.

Dr. Francesco Calabrese is PT EMSE Faculty, with over fifty five years of combined business, technical and teaching experience in high technology information and telecommunications systems design, implementation and integration programs, coupled with engineering, geodetic, geospatial intelligence and photogrammetric activities.

Hassan Syed is the Founder and CEO of Bir Ventures. A technologist at heart, he has broad international experience and an impressive track record of converting concepts into successful products. Using his 20+ years of experience in technology leadership, Hassan enjoys solving real world problems. Since 2012, Hassan amalgamated and leads a collaborative network of 85 professionals from diverse backgrounds, working on innovative technology products and launching them into the market.

Natasha has worked in product and business management and development with a focus on design over the past 15 years. Educated as a mechanical engineer, Natasha has led the design, manufacturing, and marketing of services, businesses and products to the global market in multiple industries. Natasha currently advises entrepreneurs and teams and co-designs innovation models and frameworks. Her consulting focus is on providing multi-modal interactive simulations for leadership, organizational development and innovation training and product development in profit, non-profit organizations and public school settings. Natasha engages people and organizations who want something different, better or more. Natasha is certificated as a SCRUM Product Owner in Agile practices and Pragmatic Marketing (PMC) and trained in Design Thinking, the Art of Hosting and the Art of Convening.

Paul Taylor is a University of Minnesota Twin Cities graduate with an Economics major and Mathematics minor. His thirty year career with International Milling/Multifoods included business unit (Consumer Products and Industrial Foods) senior management responsibilities including Corporate Officer positions in Sales, Marketing, General Management and Information Services. Since leaving International Multifoods he has worked with three Twin Cities early stage companies (Data Processing and Private Lending) as well as a successful management consulting practice as a Principal with the Masters Alliance. Taylor’s “fourth career” includes an active business volunteer presence with TiE Minnesota, Midwest Region Clean Tech Open and MN High Tech Association. Taylor was the Midwest Region Clean Tech Open 2103 Mentor of the Year and advised Garden Fresh Farms (St. Paul, MN) the 2013 Regional and National Clean Tech Open Sustainability award recipient. Taylor is widely known for his extensive business network.

Dr. Qaiser Khan has a consultative command on evidence-based research in multiple areas of management and technology. In addition to his degree in Medicine, he received in MBA in International Business from the University of Birmingham Qaiser is an ambitious and confident individual possessing professional skills to work in a challenging and dynamic environment. Qaiser worked as a medical officer at different public and private healthcare institutions before his change of heart. After completing his MBA, he has served as a Risk Management Consultant and Financial Advisor at an engineering firm.

Dr. Rajiv Tandon is presently teaching classes in entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. He is on the Board of Advisors at the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. He was Founder, Chairman and CEO of Adayana, Inc. (www.adayana.com) a US based performance improvement and workforce development company. Adayana is listed in Inc 500/5000 fastest growing companies and the Top 20 Training Outsourcing Companies for the past 5 years in a row. Adayana was acquired by Comvest in January 2014. He is a serial entrepreneur and has been involved with Technology in Education/Training ever since there has been that domain including the prior entrepreneurial companies LearningByte and Institute for Advanced Technology. Under a Bush Leadership Fellowship, his doctoral dissertation in entrepreneurship examined critical success factors in emerging companies and built a model for evaluating the success potential of new Entrepreneurship in the US. His research became the basis of the earliest and very successful program in Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas.

Working in the area of analytics and consulting for the last eight years, Ranita brings vast experience in customer analytics and business consulting. She has worked with global clients in Retails and Financial institutions to build a good understanding of typical business problems in these industries and used analytics and business frameworks to solve these problems. Specialized in areas of customer life cycle management including advanced analytic like customer lifetime value, campaign management, predictive analytic and survey analysis, Ranita can identify problems swiftly and come up with unique solutions. Ranita holds a Masters in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Highly qualified Business & Finance Executive with wealth of experience in multinational & diverse industries – worked with multinational work force, creative expert with leadership qualities. Forty years in the legal finance and administration with multiple skills Shah Khan brings value to any organization.

Vikas Gupta is the Founder & CEO of GTEN Technologies, a technology services company , Co-Founder and Bir Ventures, a technology incubator that brings ideas to reality. A technologist by choice , he has decades of international experience in designing, architecture defination and building SaaS based products. Since 2007, Vikas has brought 7 products to life for international customers in domains as diverse as Gaming, Online Marketing, Business Process Flow Automation ,Community based entrepreneurship. Vikas firmly believes that every problem has a solution and every real life process can be made more efficient by use of technology leading to savings of time, cost and effort. The unique selling point Vikas brings to the table is his ability to bring seamless synergy between business and technology teams where everyone is connected to the vision, understands what roles they play, and find personal fulfillment as well. His colleagues describe him as visionary, big-picture thinker, and innovative. Vikas has broad hands-on technical experience, making him a good problem solver, when leading any technology team. He enjoys working on latest technologies and improving efficiency of teams to deliver solutions on time, within budget and defect free.

Yasir is an accomplished and goal-driven professional with international work experience in different sectors. He received his MBA from the University of Birmingham. He has been working with Ideagist since its early days. Yasir brings outstanding project management, problem-solving and business analysis expertise to the Ideagist team.