Todd Johnston was a designer before designing was cool. For decades, he and his colleagues have practiced design to accelerate innovation for corporations and countries. His team designs the collaborative sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where they are often tasked to help leaders tackle the biggest challenges. Next week, Todd makes his debut as the Head of Design for our Global Innovation Summit in Silicon Valley.
We set a simple challenge for ourselves: if we believe that innovative ecosystems can be designed across entire countries, then surely we can create an ecosystem in a single conference. Therefore, working with Todd, we have turned the conference into a giant design laboratory. Instead of listening to one-way lectures, our participants will be working in small startup-like teams to tackle real problems in real time. Instead of talking in abstraction, our participants will be building tangible, 3D prototype solutions to tackle systemic challenges.