Morning Stage 2025
Renowned, international speakers will be presenting their inspiring, visionary ideas at Innovation Day once again this year. We bring together forward thinkers from the worlds of business, media and politics to open up new perspectives and develop sustainable solutions.
Look forward to a wealth of inspiration under the overarching theme TOGETHER UNLIMITED and find out how networked thinking and action can lead to lasting success.
We’ll be letting you know about this year’s Morning Stage line-up here very soon, so stay tuned!
Review - Morning Stage 2024
Speaker 2024
Adam Davidson
Award-winning New Yorker writer and the author of The Passion Economy.
A widely respected public voice with a unique talent for explaining the complicated interconnections between business, technology and economics, he was previously an economics writer for the New York Times Magazine. Davidson co-founded and ran NPR’s Planet Money, served as NPR’s international business and economics correspondent, and has been a frequent contributor to This American Life, where he received a Peabody Award, a DuPont-Columbia Award and a Polk Award for his work on “The Giant Pool of Money”. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, GQ and Rolling Stone, among other publications. He also served as a technical consultant to Adam McKay, the co-writer and director of the Academy Award-winning film The Big Short (and later, Davidson’s cohost on Gimlet Media podcast Surprisingly Awesome). He is currently launching a course on passion storytelling for business with the education start-up Maven. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and lives in Charlotte, Vermont with his wife and son.
Cathy Hackl
A globally recognised tech and gaming exec, futurist and speaker focused on spatial computing, virtual worlds, augmented reality, AI and gaming platforms strategy.
Cathy Hackl is the CEO of Spatial Dynamics, a spatial computing and AI solutions company and a top tech voice on LinkedIn. Cathy has worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Magic Leap and HTC VIVE and has worked with companies like Nike, Ralph Lauren, Walmart, Louis Vuitton and Clinique on their emerging tech and gaming journeys.
As a sought-after keynote speaker, she has spoken at Harvard Business School, MIT, SXSW, Comic-Con, WEF, CES, MWC and more. She is one of Ad Age’s Leading Women of 2023, was featured on the cover of Forbes LatAm’s 100 Most Powerful Women 2023 issue and is on the Vogue Business 100 Innovators list.
She hosts Adweek’s highly successful TechMagic podcast and is popularly known in tech circles as the Godmother of the Metaverse. Cathy has been a fixture in the world of immersive technology for almost a decade with many media appearances in CNBC’s Squawk Box, 60 Minutes, CNN, Good Morning America, GQ, Time, The Economist and Bloomberg, and is a guest editor for Vogue Singapore.
In 2022, she became the first human to ring NASDAQ’s opening bell and open the financial markets both in physical and avatar form while on live television.
Francesca Bria
She is an innovation economist working at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, cities and society.
Francesca Bria is Honorary Professor in the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL in London and part of the High-Level Round Table for the New European Bauhaus set up by the EC President Ursula von der Leyen to accelerate the EU Green Deal. She is the former President of the Italian National Innovation Fund and a Board Member of the Italian public media company RAI.
From 2015 to 2019, she was Chief Digital Technology and Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona. In this role, she led the Smart City Agenda and was one of the founders of the United Nations Cities Coalition for Digital Rights. Francesca Bria was the founder of DECODE, the EU flagship project on data sovereignty in Europe, and is a Senior Adviser on the EC programme STARTS (innovation at the nexus of science, technology and the arts).
Francesca has taught at several universities in the UK and Italy and advised governments and public and private organisations on technology and innovation policy and its socio-economic, geopolitical and environmental impact. She was nominated Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and was listed in the Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes Magazine. Francesca is also Culture Person of the Year 2020 according to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and has also been recognised as one of the world’s top 20 most influential people in digital government by Apolitical.
Niklas Maak
Niklas Maak moderated the panel discussion with Francesca Bria.
Niklas Maak, who was born in 1972, is a German architectural theorist, journalist and writer. He studied art history in Hamburg and Paris, going on to graduate with a PhD on the design theory of Paul Valéry and Le Corbusier in 1998. Since 2001, he has worked for German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as an art and architecture critic and since 2014 he has also taught architectural theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. For his writing, he has received awards including the Merck Prize from the German Academy for Language and Poetry. With his students, he built the Frankfurt Prototype, an experimental building for the ecological and social future of the city, which opened at the beginning of October. He recently published his essay ‘Server Manifesto: Data Center Architecture and the Future of Democracy’ and his novel ‘Technophoria’, which is currently being made into a film.
