Linda Bernardi
Technologist, Entrepreneur, Innovator, Former IBM Chief Innovation Officer Chief Innovation
An innovation activist, Linda Bernardi helps organizations break free of their comfort zone, defy conventional wisdom, and shatter outdated paradigms.
Linda Bernardi lives and breathes technology disruption and innovation. Today, technology is evolving like never before, and Linda is involved in cutting edge technologies across all sectors, such as Finance, Retail, Healthcare, High Tech, Logistics, Automotive, Consumer Goods, and all others. Her focus is to enable all enterprises to imagine, disrupt, innovate at record pace, and make the impossible become possible. She works with startups all around the globe, as well as large companies, to enable and inspire enterprises to build a culture of mindful innovation. She loves to practice the beautiful Art of Imagination – the first step towards innovation.
Linda believes that the best ideas are the ‘crazy’ ideas, stemming from a keen sense of unbounded imagination, and she works to unleash people’s imaginations. Over the last few years, she has focused a lot of her work around the topic of how to disrupt and innovate in today’s (possibly permanent) virtual/disconnected world and the art of Leveraging the Digital Workforce to enhance innovation in companies. Unless we mindfully and creatively adopt new ways of thinking about innovation, we will not succeed in this new world. This is at the center of her 3rd book to be published in 2023.
Linda’s background is equally focused on her history as a highly successful serial entrepreneur, as well as a serial high-level executive. She is a very active technology disruptor and a passionate innovator. She helps clients imagine, develop a vision, build products, reshape, and re-imagine their future. As a wellknown author in technology disruption and innovation, she reaches thousands of people each year, helping re-shape companies. Today she is embarking on her most ambitious startup – connecting the world of video gaming and music, dynamically via AI and machine learning.
Linda’s academic and professional background is in data and AI, focused on understanding large scale data to build the best (and always evolving) customer experiences and products. She was founder and CEO of the very first IoT company in the world, where she helped people imagine/realize a world where everything would be connected to the internet and how this would change the world. Her other startups have disrupted numerous areas of technology. In her role as Chief Innovation Officer at IBM, she was involved with introducing Watson to the world and enabling IBM’s Fortune 100 companies to disrupt and innovate at a rapid rate. She was SVP and head of products at Element AI in Montreal, building AI products for enterprises. In her role as Head of Strategy at Consensys, Linda was involved in blockchain and cryptocurrency (Ethereum) adoption, especially by the financial sector. She also built the largest clinical trial software product used by all pharmaceutical companies today, and large-scale satellite detection and pattern recognition systems, used by Aerospace and Defense today. Linda purposefully works across all sectors, never limiting the possibilities of disruption and innovation, and always practicing the art of imagination.
To further promote the concepts of disruption and innovation, she authored her first book, ProVoke, (2011), talking about the necessity of cultures of innovation. Her second book, The Inversion Factor (2017), received Best Business Theory Award at MIT, 2018, and high praise from the WSJ. The Inversion Factor discusses how technologies such as AI, IoT, blockchain, along with an open mindset, can allow us to build experiences, not just products. ‘Customer Experience’ is now at the core of all companies’ innovation agendas.
Linda’s graduate degree is in Applied Mathematics from UCLA. She is an avid learner, a relentless innovator, and excited to be part of your disruption and innovation journey.
C-AGILITY
This is one of Linda Bernardi’s main focuses today as she works with clients. C-Agility, or COVID-Agility means agility and hyper-innovation during COVID-19 across all sectors and across the world. We are seeing disruption, innovation, and agility demonstrated across ALL industries, predicated by COVID-19, but Bernardi has always believed humans can innovate at a much higher rate. In Bernardi's talks, she goes through 10-15 detailed examples across all industries, and as she discusses these topics, audiences get super excited about the potential ahead. You see the change instantly. C-Agility has certain components, which Bernardi covers in detail, and her audiences become very confident that it applies to them and that they can innovate much faster and much better. Bernardi's second book, The Inversion Factor, talks about how companies can build better products and offerings once they understand their customer data (AI)- and Bernardi is seeing Inversion, her IP, getting tons of traction. This is exciting, because it means that companies are disrupting and innovating faster and more meaningfully. This is hyper-exciting for audiences across all sectors, and is factual + meaningful + inspirational.
CONNECTED VIRTUAL CULTURE
In the C-Agility topic, Linda Bernardi talks about how disruption and innovation are now growing at maximum speeds. In her first book, ProVoke, Bernardi talks about how we (humans) need to get out of our own way, and need to accept disruption and innovation! This creates cultures that are capable and confident that they can innovate and have the permission to disrupt. We humans are at the moment disconnected, but connected in objective, speed, and purpose. C-Agility brings us together, like never before. However, to fully succeed, we need to embrace the challenges and focus, re-thinking those things that ‘bind’ our organizations together. We cannot just be a culture of Zoom-Connected-People working virtually together; we need to bind and connect meaningfully and continue this massive positive trajectory of disruption and innovation. This topic is also highly factual AND inspirational for audiences in all industries as Bernardi discusses the Disconnected-Connected-Company-Cultures.
FUTUREPROOF YOUR BUSINESS: LEVERAGING AI, IOT, AND BIG DATA IN THE FINANCIAL SECTOR
The financial industry is experiencing game-changing disruption from AI and IoT, as well as Big Data and predictive analytics. Linda Bernardi illustrates how traditional financial models are being pushed aside in today's consumer-driven “Know Me” economy by technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency. She discusses how digital disruption is literally overhauling the mobile consumer's banking expectations. A serial high-tech entrepreneur and bestselling serial author on these topics, Bernardi brings financial audiences a powerful message of futureproofing that applies to financial institutions, asset management associations, reinsurance, and the mortgage industry.
As Chief Innovation Officer at IBM and Watson Co-Lead, Bernardi is ideally qualified in how to leverage disruptive innovation. Her enthusiasm will inspire your audience to feel comfortable with disruption, empowering them to futureproof their business as disruptive technologies continue to shape the financial industry.
HOW TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION WILL RESHAPE HEALTHCARE
The healthcare industry is traditionally resistant to technological change and disruptions. However, AI, blockchain, and the resulting technological shifts are turning healthcare on its head. From intelligent robotics, personalized medicine, and compliance monitoring to immersion technology, predictive monitoring, and IoT-enabled services, Linda Bernardi discusses inversion technologies like blockchain and AI and their impact on traditional models of research, patient data, clinical trials, and drug approval. While hospitals aim for higher revenues, patients require more transparency. Patient portals are one response, but are portals enough? Bernardi says the hospital landscape of the near future must align with today's consumer-driven “Know Me” economy.
INVENT YOUR FUTURE: FUTUREPROOF YOUR BUSINESS BY EMBRACING DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
Linda Bernardi takes a deep-dive into the emergence of today's consumer-driven “Know-Me” economy and the trends surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI), The Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and crypto technologies. She raises her audience's comfort level with digital disruption and sparks optimism in the idea of futureproofing your business. Her focus is to engage you in a positive way with these transformational technologies. As author of the Amazon bestseller, The Inversion Factor: How to Thrive in the IoT Economy, Bernardi shares with audiences how to abandon the 'product-first' model and capitalize on a 'customer-need' model, as Netflix and many others have done.
