April 15 | 1:00 PM
Obi Felten is the co-founder and CEO of Flourish Labs, a healthcare company on a mission to scale peer support with telehealth and AI to address the youth mental health crisis. Flourish Labs provides telehealth peer support for teenagers and young adults at Peers.net, and expands the mental health workforce with accredited peer supporter training.
Previously, Obi was Head of Getting Moonshots Ready for Contact with the Real World at Google X, Alphabet’s ‘moonshot factory’ and innovation lab. At X, Obi advanced cutting edge technology projects such as self-driving cars (Waymo), internet from balloons (Loon), drone delivery (Wing), and sustainable energy storage using molten salt (Malta). She co-founded and led Amber, a project using brain-based biomarkers and machine learning to measure anxiety and depression.
Obi was Director of Consumer Marketing for Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa, launching and growing Google Maps, Chrome and Android from zero to hundreds of millions of users. She founded Campus, Google’s space for tech entrepreneurs. Before Google, Obi set up the ecommerce businesses of major UK retailers, worked as a strategy consultant, and led eToys.com’s (unsuccessful) expansion to Germany during the first dotcom boom.
Obi serves on the board of Springer Nature, a global academic publisher. She is an advisor on youth mental health for the Chelsea & Westminster NHS trust. She was previously on the board of Marathon Health, a primary and behavourial health care clinic, where she was a comp committee member, on the board of CreativeX, a venture-backed creative analytics company, and BfB Labs, a digital therapeutics startup. She is a regular guest lecturer at Stanford University, INSEAD, Northeastern University and UC Berkeley.
Obi was honoured for her innovation work with the German Innovation Prize "Future Thinker" award. She was named a Financial Times Woman Changemaker by the Financial Times, a leading Woman in Tech by FOCUS magazine and Top 100 most influential German woman in business by Boston Consulting Group (twice). She was on the cover of Vogue Germany's business edition and has been interviewed by the The Financial Times, Fortune, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Handelsblatt, Wirtschaftswoche, Fast Company, Wired, MIT Technology Review, the BBC, NBC News and on Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics podcast.
Obi is an advocate for women, people of colour and other underrepresented groups in technology. She mentors female startup founders and leaders getting ready for board service.
Obi grew up in Berlin and saw the wall come down. She has a BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University. She lives in California with her family. She loves yoga, biking, skiing (which she learnt at age 40), paddleboarding, cold water swimming, travelling, cooking, eating, and her family.
April 16 | 10:30 AM
Dr. Simone Ahuja is the founder of Blood Orange, an innovation and strategy advisory firm. Headquartered in Minneapolis with global teams, Blood Orange has developed a fast and frugal problem-solving methodology that helps companies achieve more innovation, better problem solving and more growth - without the overwhelm.
Simone’s work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, FastCompany and Forbes. She has served as an advisor to MIT’s Practical Impact Alliance and Noora Health, a FastCompany “Most Innovative Company”. Simone provides innovation and intrapreneurship advisory services, interactive labs and keynotes to organizations including Google, LinkedIn Procter & Gamble, Target Corp, Medtronic, Stanley Black and Decker, and the World Economic Forum.
Simone is the co-author of the international bestseller Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, and author of Disrupt-It-Yourself: Hacking the Corporation to Make it Fast, Fluid and Frugal, selected by Forbes as a “must-read leadership book”.
She is a committed practitioner of improvisational comedy, applying its principles of adaptability and creative problem-solving to her work. And while she’s appeared on the BBC and CNN.com, Simone’s favorite titles are Mama-in-Residence to Niko (11) and Zara (6) and Simplicity Nerd; both of which come in handy more often than you’d think.
April 17 | 11:15 AM
As institutions grapple with tightening budgets, increased scrutiny over the cost of education, and shifting learner expectations, a new wave of innovation is redefining value in postsecondary education. This panel explores the evolving financial realities facing colleges and universities—and the creative, cross-sector strategies emerging in response.
Leaders from higher ed, state agencies, and the private sector will share:
From creative budget models to rethinking how value is communicated and delivered, this conversation will equip attendees with practical insights and bold ideas to bring back to their institutions.
