WITI's mission is to empower women worldwide to achieve unimagined possibilities and transformations through technology, leadership and economic prosperity. So what better way to relaunch the WITI NYC Network than to get started with Innovation, where transformation possibilities are endless!
While people have generated new ideas for centuries, recently innovation itself has been reinvented, resulting in radical technology advances. Organizations need to embrace a culture of change and make it part of their DNA to remain relevant. We are beginning to see a phenomenon of emerging intrapreneurship to deal with innovation more autonomously, strategically, and systematically, driven in part by a restless, younger workforce eager to make an impact. So how do organizations incorporate a disrupting change agent and how well are they tapping into the full innovative potential and insights of women in their midst?
Innovators are changing education, health, travel, finance, engineering, retail, and households, to name just a few. Who are some of the women who are making an impact in these areas? How are they leveraging and developing technology to enable their vision?
Join us to hear what our speakers are observing, planning, and implementing in the Innovation space. Leave us with a new connection and the inspiration to embark on a professional and personal innovation journey!
Featured Speaker(s)
Moderator:
Michelle Greenwald is CEO of
Inventours, a firm that creates unique, highly curated visits to leading innovators in diverse fields (technology, product design, food) in creative cities such as Copenhagen, Paris, New York, Milan, Tel Aviv, to help heads of new product development improve their innovation processes. She runs "Innovation Days" for companies, with best practice benchmarking and observational, insight-generating "safari's" to foster cultures of innovation. Michelle is a unique blend of marketing practitioner, former SVP New Products, Disney, and VP and GM, Pepsi-Cola; She's also a marketing professor who teaches at Wharton, Columbia, Cornell, NYU, and IESE business schools; Michelle writes about innovation for
Forbes and
Inc.com, and wrote the book,
Catalyzing Innovation to help firms innovate more systematically and inspire fresh thinking; through her firm,
Marketing Visualized™, Michelle does business plan and marketing consulting, and executive education.
Speakers:
Isabel Espina Carvajal is the Chief Data Architect of ADP’s Innovation Lab. Isabel has been an IT professional for the last 20+ years primarily focused around all things Data from modeling, design, to engineering and infrastructure. Today Isabel and her team of data architects are responsible for all the data design around new technologies researched and incubated in the ADP Innovation lab. Isabel has contributed to many patents filed by ADP. She was most recently key to the launch of ADP’s Marketplace, Semantic Search, Big Data, and Behavioral Intelligence.
Prior to ADP, Isabel worked for Citibank, N.A. supporting various database technologies for their retail bank.
Isabel has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ.
Ruven Gotz leads the Digital Workplace practice and is also the Innovation Center Director at Avanade in New York City.
As a consultant, speaker and author with over 20 years of technology consulting experience, Ruven has spent the past decade building innovative collaboration solutions for his clients. He has advised clients on governance, information architecture and the adoption of collaboration and enterprise social tools.
Ruven has spoken recently at conferences in Europe, South Africa, Australia and across North America. He is also the author of a
book on Information Architecture. Ruven grew up in Toronto, but is now enjoying the pace of life in Manhattan.
Amy Kadomatsu is the co-founder and president of ROKO Labs, a startup in NYC helping entrepreneurs worldwide engage and connect with their users through tools and services that enable companies to build better apps and have a 360° view into their user base. In 2016, ROKO Labs is also launching the
App Idea Awards, a competition that will help the winner build their app and aims to democratize innovation. Prior to ROKO Labs, Amy held executive positions at Snaps!, S&P Capital IQ, and TheMarkets.com, among others. She is a serial entrepreneur that specializes in delivering engaging products to users. Amy has led businesses and boards through enormous growth and successful exits. Amy is chair of the board of directors at
MOUSE, a national youth development nonprofit that believes in technology as a force for good. Amy holds an AB from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Marie-Michelle Strah, PhD
Director, Enterprise Architecture, Fortune 50 Company
Dr. Strah works in Strategy and Architecture for a Fortune 50 company in New York, NY. Having launched an enterprise application portfolio rationalization initiative in 2014, she now leads the organization's enterprise information modernization efforts. Michelle works at the intersection of digital properties, cloud, mobility and data privacy and security and enjoys leading innovation and data insights while minimizing enterprise risk.
Prior to this, Michelle was on Microsoft's Applied Incubation Team launching private and national cloud efforts in Latin America. She was also the worldwide lead for Enterprise Information Management growing technical communities and intellectual property for information assurance and governance for both public and private sector.
A strong champion of women in technology, she has co-founded 2 corporate women in technology groups, relaunched and matured a third and inaugurated the national Women in SharePoint initiative as well as led Women in SharePoint DC. She is currently in her second year as a FIRST Robotics mentor of an all girls school and a proud member of NYC Women in Machine Learning and Data Science.
Dr. Strah is a US Army veteran, was a Javits Fellow from 1993-1997 and holds a master's and doctorate degree from Cornell University as well as a BA and BAIS from Miami University.
