Ela Ben-Ur

Ela Ben-Ur consults, coaches and teaches in innovation through the organization she founded, i2i Experience. Ela worked 13 incredible prior years at renowned innovation and design firm IDEO. Her design practice and leadership at IDEO spanned diverse geographies, industries, and sectors, with clients from startups to Fortune 100 companies. She was a founder of IDEO’s Leadership Studio for developing project leaders, as well as of the design research practice in IDEO’s Shanghai studio. Ela has taught at pioneering Olin College (profiled in the book Creating Innovators) since 2007, and offered workshops through MIT (her alma mater), Sloan, Babson, Dartmouth, Harvard, and the International Development Design Summit. Ela enjoys adventure in the great outdoors and improvising on violin. Her 2- and 4-year old daughters are her inspiration.

Panos Panay

Panos Panay is the Founding Managing Director of Berklee ICE (Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship) as well as a passionate entrepreneur and active startup mentor in the creative media space. As the founder of Sonicbids, he created the leading platform for bands to book gigs and market themselves online, building a subscriber network of 550,000 bands and 35,000 promoters from over 100 countries. He led the company as CEO for 13 years, from its inception until after its successful acquisition by Backstage LLC, in a deal backed by Guggenheim Partners. Panos is widely credited for spotting and capitalizing early on three distinct emerging trends in the music business over the last decade: the shift to a primarily online means of marketing; the emergence of an “artistic middle class”; and the shift from a record-label funded industry to a consumer brand-funded music business. He writes weekly about startups and entrepreneurship for blogs and publications such as Huffington Post, Forbes, WSJ Accelerators and Fast Company; and guest lectures at universities including MIT Engineering, MIT Sloan, Boston University, Brown University, and Wharton School of Business He speaks often at industry and private events like SXSW, MIDEM and TEDx. As a passionate arts and business advocate Panos serves on a number of boards including being the Chair of Berklee College of Music’s Presidential Advisory Council for seven years. He is a die-hard supporter of English football club Arsenal F.C. Awards include: Fast Company’s “Fast 50” honor; Inc Magazine’s “Inc 500”; Mass Hi-Tech All Stars; Berklee College’s Distinguished Alumnus Award; and Boston Business Journal’s “40 under 40” and BostInno’s “50 on Fire”. Sonicbids and Panos were also profiled in a chapter in the Financial Times-published book “Outsmart” by best-selling author Jim Champy.

• Centre for Entrepreneurship (C4E)
• Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship

Supporters:

• Interaction Design Foundation