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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.