Lift Conference

Lift13 Recap

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:59:01 GMT

Over 1000 participants coming from 30 countries, including 70 journalists and bloggers came together to share, connect and create new opportunities. We had a wonderful time at this 8th edition of Lift in Geneva and we hope you enjoyed it too, and left inspired and lifted!

For more information: http://liftconference.com/lift13

Quel futur pour l'industrie du luxe?

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:42:52 GMT

Deux des entrepreneurs les plus innovants du moment partageront leur vision pour le futur de leur industrie. Un débat qui évoquera les grands défis que posent les technologies, et l'arrivée de nouveaux acteurs issus des pays émergents.
Avec Xavier Dietlin, fondateur Dietlin Artisans Métalliers depuis 1854 SA et Maximilian Büsser, fondateur et Creative Director MB&F.

Lift12 Recap

Thu, 31 May 2012 17:44:55 GMT

The 7th edition of Lift in Geneva welcomed over 1000 people from 30 countries for 2.5 days of inspiration and networking. It covered themes like Technology and/in Crisis, The New Face of Gaming, Digital Innovation in Luxury, Beyond Finance and Extreme Hackers.

The Lift12 program featured over 40 talks by speakers such as David Rowan (Wired UK), Nick Heller (Google), Anais St. Jude (Stanford), JP Rangaswami (Salesforce) and Sean Park (Anthemis). Besides the talks participants were invited to join over 20 workshops, a Google Dating Fondue, the start-up venture night and the Röstigraben Express Train from Zurich to Geneva.

Thank you all for making this fantastic experience happen, see you at Lift13 :)

Mass customisation and 3D printing

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:51:21 GMT

Lisa Harouni is responsible dor the day-to-day management of Digital Forming, a startup that offers design companies and lifestyle brands a competitive edge by allowing customers to get involved in the design process of products.

After an introduction about 3D printing technologies, Lisa will show their benefits and implications for both businesses and individual: rapid prototyping, mass customization, return of local production, consequences on copyright laws, and more.

She will also describe the potential fields of applications of this technology in the near future.

Technologies vs people

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:35:01 GMT

JP Rangaswami discusses the following interrogations: did technology make our lives easier or worse? What are the things that got better, beyond the obvious and utopian views? Did technologies make our jobs easier or worse? Are we collaborating better?

Democratizing Innovation - Grandma likes that by Fabian Hemmert

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:07:15 GMT

In his talk, Fabian Hemmert talks about the democratization of technological innovation. He shows a series of projects conducted at the Design Research Lab in Berlin, which, rather than serving the average user, embraced niches and extremes.

Perspective on information overload by Anaïs Saint-Jude

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:41:06 GMT

Is information overload really new? Anais Saint Jude will provide a bit of perspective by looking at another great period of innovation: the 17th century.

Reinventing finance, one startup at the time

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:09:01 GMT

Sean Park believes finance will change radically in the coming months. He will show us some of the startups he believes in, from people reinventing banks to new payment systems.

Here are the links Sean mentions in his talk:

And just in case you are interested/curious, here are the other companies currently in the Anthemis ecosystem:

FinanceACar – World’s first car finance comparison site
MileSense – Turning data into intelligent risk analysis
Metamarkets – Fast insight for big data
BluFin – Look at finance in a new way
MoBank – Cutting edge mCommerce solutions
PayPerks – Powering innovative solutions for the financially underserved
PeerIndex – Understand your social capital
Hooplo – Social games publishing platform
Visual.ly – Data visualization platform for big data

David Rowan "Startup entrepreneurs should move to Africa now"

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:14:49 GMT

David Rowan thinks featured Africa is the next place where great technological innovations will happen. He will explain how startup entrepreneurs should move there.

Juliana Rotich "Ushahidi: Powered by Open Source"

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:25:55 GMT

What happens when barriers to use of technology are lowered? What can we learn from the Ushahidi open source community and the technology landscape in Africa about the opportunity and the limits of open innovation?

Jonathan Kuniholm "Open Prosthetics, where it comes from, what it changes,...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:28:09 GMT

Open Prosthetics is a movement and a community that looks (i) to find economically feasible ways of producing medical devices for underserved medical populations and (ii) to give patients a way to participate to (even large and sophisticated) projects that develop technologies in their name. By facilitating the exchange of knowledge, Open prosthetics has allowed projects to develop that make prosthesis more available, while others focus more on new possibilities that would never find a market before that (such as specialized, customized, or even fancy replacement limbs), or even new ways of producing high-end research (lego hands for prototyping...).

Paul Wicks "Putting patients at the center of healthcare; disruption in...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:17:55 GMT

The current disruption in healthcare corresponds to the fact that patients can access tools to gather information, aggregate data, act, and see results reflected in real-time. In his speech, Paul Wicks presents the consequences which can be listed as follows:
Medicine: Patients are more engaged with managing their own illness, receive better outcomes / resistance from medical community in some quarters
Research: Patients can find out about clinical trials going on anywhere in the world and participate online or even carry out their own research programs - increasingly being viewed as credible in the peer-reviewed world
Business: Payers want to pay for improved outcomes, not transactions. The pill must be shown to be more effective than existing alternatives in the real world, not just a placebo in a controlled trial.
Safety: Patients can submit their own safety events in real-time and enter in to a dialogue with manufacturers about how to improve their products.

Frédéric Mazzella "How car-pooling can help forecast car traffic"

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:10:00 GMT

Carpooling consists in sharing a car on a similar trip. Drivers publish their available seats with a price, and passengers buy seats for home-to-work carpooling (on a day-to-day basis for a distance of around 20km) and long-distance carpooling (one-off trips or week-end round-trips for distances of 300km in average). The speech focuses on how to forecast car traffic based on car-pooling platforms with visual representations.

Adam Greenfield "On public objects: connected things and civic...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:09:00 GMT

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

Saskia Sassen "The Future of Smart Cities"

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:21:56 GMT

A leading researcher on globalization, global cities and new technologies Saskia Sassen discusses the current hype around smart cities. She reminds us that “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”

Jose A. Briones: "A New Approach To Innovation Management"

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:12:38 GMT

This video has been uploaded by a member of the Lift community. To send us your videos, click here.

Product innovation has been described as the way out of today's difficult business environment. However, the rate of success of development projects, in particular white space or disruptive innovation projects remains too low.
We believe that a reason for the low success rate is the erroneous application of methods designed for incremental innovation like Stage Gate to projects with high levels of uncertainty. In this presentation we will discuss the different types of development projects based on degree of uncertainty, and the creation of different project tracks. Projects are managed using different tool sets based on the best fit between information available and decision making needs. (

Gunter Pauli "Changing the planet"

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:49:00 GMT

Gunter Pauli, from the "Zero Emissions Research Initiative" gives a vibrant speech about how nature provides an important model to find solutions to the ecological crisis. His call for action is followed by disruptive and inspiring examples ranging from battery-less devices to biomimetism.

Alex Osterwalder "A new approach to designing business models"

Mon, 30 May 2011 12:31:00 GMT

Alex Osterwalder is the best-selling author of Business Model Generation. He tells us how organizations start approaching the challenge of designing business models in a radically new way. Companies learn how to test their business models upfront, iterating on the feedback received from their clients, thereby reducing the risk of failure.

Nick Coates "Co-creation: present and future"

Tue, 24 May 2011 09:40:52 GMT

Nick Coates of Promise Communities explains the fundamental rules that make co-creation possible. He shows how an idea that has been around for decades is being put back into the spotlight by communication technologies, and tells the audience what to expect for the future of this re-emerging discipline.

Sabine Hauert "Robotics today"

Fri, 13 May 2011 13:08:24 GMT

Sabine is a researcher from the EPFL specializing in robotics. Her presentation explains how robots are changing the way we live and work, with more autonomous and intelligent machines coming to us in the near future. Sabine closes her talk by explaining the legal and ethical challenges facing this growing industry.

Marcel Kampman "Reinventing schools - project Dream School"

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:40:31 GMT

What if you could reinvent a school from scratch? What would you change, how would the technologies that reinvent education impact the construction and design of the building? Marcel Kampman is taking over that challenge in the Netherlands, and share the story of "Project DreamSchool".

Steve Portigal "Discover and act on insights about people"

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 12:11:00 GMT

What do customers want or need ? A permanent concern for entrepreneurs, designers, marketers and others seeking to innovate. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and he explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers’) can drive innovation.

Jean-Claude Biver "The importance of innovation and thinking different"

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 09:06:17 GMT

Entrepreneur Jean-Claude Biver, famous for his work at Hublot, talks about innovation, creativity, and his philosophy that can be summarized by three commandments: "be the first, be unique, be different".

Don Tapscott "MacroWikinomics"

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:54:18 GMT

"What an amazing time in human history. Among other things, there is a revolution in revolutions. Up until three weeks ago [during the events in Tunisia], all revolutions throughout history had leaders..."

Don Tapscott talks about the new age of networked economy, and how collaborative innovation is deeply transforming our society as well as our institutions. Why not open source government, education, science, energy production or even health care as new models of collaboration?

Thomas Sutton "Creating space for open innovation"

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:24:48 GMT

What happens if we stop trying to understand consumers’ needs, and start cultivating empty spaces where people can innovate for themselves? In other words, letting go of the dream of a perfect, scientific innovation process by which products or services could "fulfill unmet needs".