Bran Ferren

Bran Ferren combines unparalleled expertise as a technologist and designer with top-of-the-game experience in organizing and leading innovation teams. As founder, co-chairman and Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds, he helps organizations get to the next step in their business development with new ideas, practical guidance in becoming more creative, and strategies for executing on innovation. Ferren is a visionary who has worked in theater, film special effects, product design, architecture and the sciences. Before co-founding Applied Minds in 2000 with Danny Hillis, Ferren founded Associates & Ferren, an R&D company serving the visual and performing arts, as well as industry and the sciences. A&F became part of Walt Disney Imagineering in 1993, the resource for new technology invention and creative input for the entire company, where Ferren held several leadership positions, including president.

Ferren's current clients include GM, Lockheed Martin, NASA, the National Security Agency and other corporations and government agencies that value his unique combination of strengths: equal measures of genius in science and technology, art and design, creative ideas and successful innovation leadership. He speaks with unique authority on:

• creativity and innovation in enterprises - how to get it to happen and how to organize it;
• design - transforming organizations to create new products and services, new processes and effective organizational structures;
• the future - as Allan Kay has said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it; Bran can help you build a vision of what the world will be like in twenty years