SALIM ISMAIL

Chairman, OpenExO, Author “Exponential Organizations”, Board Member - X Prize, Founding Executive Director, Singularity University



Salim is a sought-after business strategist, who presents globally to the leaders of many of the world’s largest companies and Heads of State. 

He has been featured across a vast array of media outlets, including The New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, WIRED, Vogue, Fox Business and the BBC. Part of Salim’s magnetism is that he speaks from experience in transforming companies. 

He is the Founder and Chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO, which help companies to implement the lessons from Exponential Organizations by emulating the world’s fastest growing companies. They inspire innovators to replace incremental innovation with 10X improvements, implement groundbreaking technologies and profitably achieve large-scale social impact. They have created billions of dollars of return on investment over the past 4 years for clients, including Procter & Gamble, HP, Visa, BHP, and Stanley Black & Decker.

Salim is a serial entrepreneur, having also founded technology companies including New York Grant Company, Confabb, PubSub Concepts, Fastrack Institute, and Ångströ, which was acquired by Google in 2010. He led Brickhouse, Yahoo!’s internal incubator and was the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University. He is a Board member of XPRIZE Foundation, Rokk3r Inc., Aion Advisory Board, and a General Partner of Rokk3r Fuel ExO Venture Fund. These associations give him extraordinary access to the most influential innovators of our time, plus technologies and business ideas while they are in stealth mode. 

Salim’s quantum physics and philosophy education combined with his career experience gives him a uniquely macro vision of how the institutions that underpin our society and economy are broken and should be fixed. His entertaining, irreverent, epiphany-inducing presentations are known for impressing even the most skeptical listeners.

  • Innovation

  • Exponential Organizations

  • Future Trends

  • Technology

Disruptive Convergence

Salim describes major breakthroughs occurring in a series of accelerating technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, biotech, sensors, neuroscience, medicine, and even energy. He describes the implications of these breakthroughs on both society and business, and will give a perspective on their impact tailored to each specific audience.

 

Exponential Organizations

As a result of accelerating change, a new breed of businesses is scaling ten times faster then established organizational structures. Salim calls these exponential organizations. The talk describes the characteristics and attributed of these organizations, and finishes with how to implement these ideas into established companies.

 

Future of Entrepreneurship

The confluence of new developments makes today the best time ever to be an entrepreneur. Salim talks about how accelerating technologies, crowd funding, incubators, fablabs, and cloud computing have made it faster, better, and cheaper to be an entrepreneur. This talk also covers the steps needed to create entrepreneurial ecosystems and start-up communities in different regions.

 

Future of Democracy

The information age and the resulting transparency is causing enormous stress for governments around the world. However, major opportunity exists in leveraging new technologies to transform major government activities such as regulatory frameworks, information management, intellectual property, and public services.

 

Future of Education

His vantage point at Singularity University, Salim is at the forefront of the transformation occurring in education. He talks through the structural changes occurring in the education space and how governments and regions can chart a future for education systems.