Norman Lewis – Keynote Speaker

Norman Lewis was Director of Technology Research at Orange (part of France Telecom) until 2005. In 2007 he was appointed Chief Strategy Office for Wireless Grids Corporation of the US. In the same year he was appointed Chairman of the ITU (International Telecommications Union) Telecom Forum Programme Committee.
Today Norman works in the role of innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers since 2011.

Norman has been a strategic pioneer in crafting innovation frameworks for the future application of information and communication technologies in society.

At France Telecom, he lead a world class research team which conducted in-depth research of medium to long-term customer trends and their interaction with emerging disruptive technologies. He established an Innovation Management Network and became the France Telecom Executive Board member of the Communications Futures Programme at MIT.

From 1999-2001 he was Head of Research at CSCAPE LTD. His role at cScape (one of the leading Web-Integration companies in the UK ) was to help identify new business opportunities opened by the early development of Microsoft’s .NET technologies.

In 1997 he became Founder and Director of Globalisation and Power in the Twenty-First Century (GAP21). GAP21 was a not-for-profit organisation which aimed to establish a global debate about the impact of Information and Communication Technologies on 21st Century society. Its aim was to bring together government, policymakers, industry, academia and civil society in a global forum in a ‘Global Intellectual Olympics’ on the future of technology and society.

From 1997-2000 he was Consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organisation. During the period of GAP21, Norman participated in numerous workshops and seminars with WIPO examining the relationship between the future of Intellectual Property and digital technologies. He advised the Thai Minister of Commerce and helped to establish the WIPO ASEAN Sub-Regional Meeting on Electronic Commerce and Intellectual Property symposium held in Chiang Mai in August 200 at which he delivered a keynote speech on Ecommerce, Intellectual Property and the Digital Divide.

Most recently Norman has been working with one of the leading Enterprise 2.0 companies in Europe, Open-Knowledge which is introducing social media into the enterprise. As a result he is involved in a number of significant projects around Social Network Analysis and the introduction of new collaborative software into companies to make them more efficient by capturing the informal networks and tacit knowledge hidden behind formal structures. This brings together his expertise on digital children and their new behaviours coupled with insight into Web2.0 technologies and practices.

In June 2009 he co-founded and authored Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation, an attempt by a group of innovators to raise a public debate about how we can overcome the current recession through innovation.

He has also been speaking on the impact of the recession on innovation. His presentation ‘YES WE CAN: Innovating out of a recession’at TEDxLeeds was selected amongst the ‘Top Presentations of the Day’.

Currently, Norman leads a crowdsourcing innovation programme at PricewaterhouseCoopers Limited.