For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript.

Here are the instructions how to enable JavaScript in your web browser

Speakers

Marte Andresen
Senior Consultant, PwC, Netherlands

Marte Andresen is a Senior Consultant in PwC the Netherlands. She provides advisory services within project and process management and analytical analysis and statistics for public sector, and in particular the domains of education and digital transformation. Marte is passionate about public challenges and aims at using her educational background, economics from the University of Oslo, and advisory experience to contribute to a sustainable public sector that can handle current and future challenges. Marte is currently involved in the initiatives ‘High Tech Skills for Europe’, ‘Curriculum Guidelines for Key enabling Technologies and Advanced Manufacturing Technology’ and ‘Promoting Online Training Opportunities for the Workforce in Europe’, all for the European Commission. 

Carlos Bertran
Fundación Generation Spain

Carlos Bertran is CEO of Generation Spain. Previously, he served as the inaugural COO, building a team and organization that now operates in 7 cities and has more than 2,000 graduates. Generation Spain is part of Generation, a non-profit that recruits, trains, and places unemployed and underemployed young adults in jobs "and has grown to be the largest global demand-driven youth employment organization in just three years of operation. Prior to Generation, he spent 16 years working with Laureate Education, the largest private higher education group in the world, with responsibilities in three countries, building and turning around businesses. Carlos holds a Bachelor's in Business Administration from Universidad Pontificia Comillas (ICADE).

Mary Cleary
Deputy CEO, ICS & ICS Foundation, Ireland

Mary Cleary is Deputy CEO of the Irish Computer Society/ICS Foundation and Vice-Chair of the CEN TC 428, “e-Competences and Professionalism”. She oversees ICT professionalism and digital inclusion policy and initiatives for ICS, coordinating the Irish Digital Jobs and Skills Coalition and advising the ICS CIO Forum on professionalism and Continuous Professional Development for all domains, with particular emphasis on eHealth. She holds a Master's Degree in Education, and has extensive experience of ICT professional programme design and implementation. She has worked on several national education initiatives, promoting ICT as a teaching and learning tool and is an active member of ECDL Foundation Expert Working Group. She manages education outreach initiatives, as well as the professional and advocacy activities of HISI (Healthcare Informatics Society of Ireland), and delivery of 8 national conferences annually. She is a delegate to the NSAI (National Standards Authority of Ireland) ICT SCC, and a committee member of the Irish Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (EGFSN).

Olivier Crouzet
Director of Pedagogy, École 42, France

Olivier Crouzet got a Master degree as an IT engineer. During scholarship, he acted both as a technical assistant and a teaching assistant. After 2 years as system administrator in the 3rd French Internet service provider, he developed during thirteen years a well-known IT school which became a French major institution. He designed the pedagogical model, and made it evolve. Based on this educational success, a new IT school '42' is created in 2013, along with Nicolas Sadirac, Kwame Yamgnane and Florian Bucher, promoting an even more advanced training methodology, called Peer-Learning. Olivier Crouzet designed this model: 100%-project-based, without any teacher, lecture, nor knowledge transfer. Students debate, exchange ideas, try, fail, try again, to reach the goal, and finally evaluate their peers. Founded and funded by Xavier Niel, owner of one of the four French telecom company, '42' is totally free for the students. In this spirit of social opening, Olivier Crouzet, while still evolving the pedagogical model of the school, is also promoting evolution in the French education system through various conferences.

Gerard De Graaf
European Comission, DG CNET

 x

Peter Droell
European Commission, DG RTD

 x

Anders Flodstrom
Education Director, EIT Digital, Sweden

Anders Flodstrom is the Education Director of EIT Digital. He was a Governing Board (GB) member and vice chair of the first EIT GB. He worked actively in establishing EIT. He is a former University Chancellor of all Swedish Universities and University Colleges. He is a former University President of KTH and Linköping University. He is a former GB member and Secretary General of the Swedish National Foundation for Science and Engineering.

Anders Flodstrom is a Professor in Physics, specializing in surface physics and experimental studies done by synchrotron radiation. He is a cofounder to MAX IV a world leading synchrotron radiation source and at that time he was an internationally recognized surface physicist. Anders Flodstrom started his innovation and research work as a researcher at Xerox PARC Stanford, NIST at Gaithersburg and HASYlab at Hamburg. In a parallel entrepreneurial career during the eighties, he was co-owner and CTO for a high tech company developing thin film technology and products for optical storage. A number of CD and DVD production units were sold on a global market.

He has chaired and been a GB member in many companies; start-ups, scale ups and matures.

Today one of the really interesting one is an American foundation I4J, Innovation for Jobs, where the creation and destruction of jobs due to the digital transformation is analyzed, researched on and debated.

Anders Flodstrom is known in Sweden for his opinions on how academic and impact qualities can be measured. In 2012 he fought his opinions with the liberal minister of Higher Education and Research and resigned when the Government did not accept his proposal.

Debbie Forster
MBE, CEO, Tech Talent Charter

Debbie Forster is a recognised figure in the areas of diversity, tech, innovation and education. She is a portfolio consultant and is co-founder and CEO for the Tech Talent Charter, an industry collective which aims to deliver greater gender diversity in the UK tech workforce. Signatories of the charter make several pledges in relation to their approach to recruitment and retention. The Tech Talent Charter’s signatories recognise that only through working together can meaningful change happen. Debbie was awarded an MBE in January 2017 for “Services to Digital Technology and Tech Development” and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) named her Woman of the Year for 2016. She has been named on Computer Weekly’s list of “25 Most Influential Women in UK IT” since 2013. Most recently Computer Weekly also named her in its 50 Most Influential People in UK IT, their “definitive list of the real movers and shakers in UK IT - the CIOs, industry executives, public servants and business leaders driving the creation of a high-tech economy.” After 20 years working within education, Debbie joined e-skills UK, the national IT Sector Skills Council, heading up their educational programmes, liaising with both policy makers and leaders in the IT industry. Debbie then became the Co CEO of Apps for Good, an award-winning education charity. Debbie joined Apps for Good in 2010 and took the organisation through a period of exponential growth, from 2 centres in London to almost 1000 schools in the UK, Spain, Portugal and the US; reaching 75,000 young people in just 5 years, with 50% of its students and 40% of its tech mentors being female.

Manuela Geleng
European Commission, DG EMPL

x

Tobias Hüsing
Senior Research Consultant, empirica GmbH

As a senior research consultant, Tobias Hüsing helps clients understand the changing skills landscape during the digital transformation we see both at macro and micro level. Tobias has been doing and leading research in the area of skills and work for more than 10 years including studies about digital skills and future skills creation, the digital transformation of SMEs, digital entrepreneurship, IT labour market scenarios and forecasts, innovation and knowledge transfer co-operation and policies, and the socio-economic impact of ICT. Tobias’ interest is especially in empirical and quantitative data based research and policy consultancy for clients such as the European Commission, other government and (IT) industry clients. Tobias has been responsible for developing several large scale cross-country surveys, he is the author of several indices and indicator scoreboards and contributed to a number of observatories. Tobias has repeatedly authored and presented digital labour market forecasts, building on the major technological, social, education, labour market and demographic trends. He recently finished the service contracts and the project ‘HumanCapital – Skills and Competences’ (2017) for the EIT – European Institute for Innovation and Technology’ and involved in a service contract for the European Commission on ‘Digital Organisational Frameworks and IT Professionalism’ (2016-2019) and is now working on the service contract ‘High-Tech Skills for Europe - Scaling up Best Practices and Re-focusing Funding Programmes and Incentives’ (2017-2019) for the European Commission. 

Ville Kairamo
CEO, Demola, Finland

Ville Kairamo is an experienced ecosystem developer and innovation management expert. Currently Ville is the CEO at Demola Global, the forerunner of co-creation facilitation for business renewal. Demola brings together industry experts from leading companies and millennials from our alliance universities around the globe to multidisciplinary co-creation challenges. Prior to Demola, Ville has been running national startup incubation network and co-founded an innovation center in Finland. His work has been recognized with Baltic Sea Region Innovation award and Nokia Foundation award for achievements in facilitating university, industry and regional innovation cooperation.

Ronald Kleijn
Project Manager, University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam, Make IT Work, Netherlands

Ronald Kleijn is Senior Lecturer at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. He has a background in Informatics, Computer Science and Business Information Systems. In the field of Business IT and Management, he gives guest lectures in Trondheim (Norway, NTNU) and Sundsvall (Sweden, Mid-Sweden University). Ronald is initiator of, and responsible for the retraining program Make IT Work, which run in several cities in The Netherlands. Make IT Work makes it possible for highly educated people without a specific IT background to be retrained to an IT job at a higher vocational level and to start work immediately. This process in the context of lifelong development is carried out by Universities of Applied Sciences and cooperating organizations. 325 students have now retrained and are working as a software engineer or business analytics specialist.

Werner B. Korte
empirica GmbH

Werner B. Korte was and is responsible for managing many large-scale international research and development and consulting projects in relation to the new forms of work and employment, e-Skills, monitoring and benchmarking the information society, demographic change and ageing, ICT services for energy saving in social housing and public buildings and other topic areas for different DGs of the European Commission (DG INFSO (CNECT), ENTR (GROW), EAC, EMPL), the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency, IPTS, national ministries, federal and regional governments and ministries in Germany, other European countries, in Qatar and global IT industry players like Cisco or Microsoft. In the e-skills domain Werner was the project coordinator of studies on monitoring and forecasting e-skills demand and supply, benchmarking, studies on policies on multi-stakeholder partnerships for e-skills in Europe quality labelling and responsible for the development of several executive briefings for Cisco Systems and another e-skills forecasting project for the ING Belgique Bank, working on the initiatives ‘European Guidelines and Quality Labels for e-Leadership Curricula’ and ‘e-Leadership skills for SMEs’, the service contracts ‘Leadership skills for digital and key enabling technologies in Europe’ all for the European Commission. He has recently completed the eSkills4Diversity project for J.P. Morgan and is currently coordinating the service contract 'High-tech skills for Europe' also for the European Commission.

Brendan McGinty
Chairperson, Skillnet Ireland and Managing Partner of Stratis Consulting

Brendan is Chairperson of Skillnet Ireland, the National Agency for Workforce Learning in Ireland, with over 65
distinct Learning Networks nationwide supporting over 15000 Companies and over 50,000 trainees. The
Skillnet Ireland mission is to facilitate increased participation in enterprise training and workforce learning
in Ireland and in doing so to ensure that businesses have the necessary skills to thrive and to maintain a
highly skilled workforce. Brendan is passionate about workforce development issues and helping organisations and workers invest in skill development and to prepare for the ‘future of work’ issues that we now face.
Brendan is a leading expert in people strategy, employee relations, employment policy, change management
and dispute resolution with 30 years of experience backed judgement. At Stratis, Brendan and his
colleagues support organisations who want to lead improvements in critical areas of Employee Relations,
People Strategy and Workplace Policy. He brings career experience, knowledge and insight to the full advantage
of clients in leading people strategies and supporting senior leaders on any sensitive employment and
people strategy issues.
Brendan worked with Ireland's national business organisation, Ibec until 2013, where as a member of the
leadership team he had a successful career as Director of Industrial Relations and Human Resource
Services.
He engages with trade unions, government, state agencies, with other stakeholders and has an excellent
appreciation of National and European employment policy.
He is also Deputy Chairman of the Governing Body of the National College of Ireland and previously
served as a board member of the Labour Relations Commission until 2015 (now the Workplace Relations
Commission). Brendan is a member of the Public Affairs Committee of the World Employment
Confederation and previously served on both the Social Affairs Committee of Business Europe and as a
member of the Governing Board of Eurofound.

Rudolf Niessler
European Commission, DG REGIO

 x

Timo Pesonen
European Commission, Director General, DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs

x

Malin Rosqvist
Senior project manager RISE, Research Institutes of Sweden

Malin Rosqvist is a senior project manager at RISE, Research Institutes of Sweden, also acting as program strategist for the strategic innovation program PiiA, Process industrial IT & Automation. Previous to these positions, Malin has worked as a project and program manager within software engineering and embedded systems research at Chalmers University of Technology and Mälardalen University, Sweden, and previous to that as marketing manager at ABB, focusing on robotics and automation.

Malin specializes in running projects in cooperation between industry and academia and is passionate about life-long learning and how to improve knowledge exchange and technical transfer from research through education. One of the educational projects in the portfolio is the PROMPT initiative, Professional Master in Software Engineering, which was awarded the European Digital Skills Award 2016. PROMPT is a national educational initiative, run in cooperation with several academic parties and a number of leading Swedish industrial companies. The goal is to enforce and increase advanced software competencies and innovativeness in industry. The PROMPT initiative is offering university courses on advanced level, directed towards professionals. The courses are largely web-based, tailored to fit in combination with work, and free of charge for both the student and the company.

Sebastian-Tim Schmitz-Hertzberg
Project Manager, go-digital, EuroNorm

Sebastian-Tim Schmitz-Hertzberg is project manager of the governmental funding program “go-digital” at the EuroNorm Association for Quality Assurance and Innovation Management in Berlin. The program is  focused on SME with the potential of digital transformation and offers financial support in three different areas: the digitalization of business processes, digital market development and stabilization of the SME’s IT security measures. Previously Sebastian worked as consultant and reviewer of R&D projects in the field of medical engineering, pharmacy and biotechnology. As quality manager he was furthermore responsible for maintenance of EuroNorm’s own integrated management system. His educational background is based on a Master degree in bioengineering and a Ph.D. in bioanalytics. During his scientific career, which was mainly focused on research in the field of autonomous biosensors, he worked at the National University of Singapore (2007), as well as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2011) and was later employed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering in Potsdam, Germany until 2014.

Slawomir Tokarski
Director, European Commission DG GROW

Slawomir Tokarski obtained PhD degree at the European University Institute in Florence in 1995.

He joined the Polish administration and headed a team coordinating the preparations for the accession negotiations and preparing policy analysis for the Chief Negotiator.

In 2004 he joined the Commission as a Cabinet member of the Commissioner responsible for the regional policy. In 2009 he was nominated Head of Unit dealing with economic policy and co-ordination of EU funding in DG MARE.

In March 2012 he became Head of Defence, Aeronautics and Maritime industries in DG Enterprise.

In February 2016 Mr Tokarski became Director, Dir F "Innovation and Advanced manufacturing" (DG GROW).

Jan Sturesson
International strategy consultant, speaker & investor, RESTING (Sweden)

x

Olle Vogel
Knowledge Foundation, Expertkompetens, Sweden

Dr. Olle Vogel holds a position as Programme Manager at the Knowledge Foundation with the main responsibility to develop and manage national programs for education/competence development. The programs are based on co-operation between academy and industry and addresses areas such as Software engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Social media and Knowledge intensive production systems.  Prior to this position Vogel worked as Project Manager at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science with responsibility for chiefly Energy issues and Foresight studies. Vogel has also been appointed as a research officer at the Swedish Research Council for Engineering Sciences (today part of the Swedish Research Council), responsible for the areas Engineering Physics, Information Technology, Biotechnology, and Medical Technology. Before that Vogel was a researcher in Atomic physics at University of Uppsala. He holds a degree in Engineering Science from the same university where he also has studied Classical Archaeology and Ancient History. Vogel is on the board of the Tandem Accelerator Laboratory in Uppsala and has been a member of other boards and committees for national laboratories/facilities in physics. He has a broad experience of commissions concerning policy and evaluation regarding efforts in competence development as well as research.

Wytse Wouda
Head of Human Capital, Ministry of Economics and Climate, Netherlands

Wytse Wouda is head of the human capital unit of the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs. The unit is positioned in the division of Entrepreneurship, which supports SME’s in their three main challenges. Besides financing and diminishing unnecessary regulations, that is to find and maintain qualified personal. For the last goal, Wytses units main instrument is the Technology Pact: An effort to structurally improve alignment between education and the technology job market and reduce the shortage of technically trained staff. Previously Wytse worked several years as the political advisor to the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs.