Blade Kotelly

Blade is an innovation and user-experience expert and a Senior Lecturer at MIT, teaching Innovation, Design-Thinking and Leadership. He wrote the first book on speech-recognition interface design (Addison Wesley, 2003) and he’s been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on media including TechTV, NPR, and the BBC.

He loves to help people and organizations innovate in new ways and learn the skills to solve “impossible” problems.

Matthew Huggins

While studying Computer Science at MIT, Matthew created the world’s first autocomplete for email and earned a spot in the Y-Combinator accelerator program. He loves to use his skills in machine learning and computer science to create innovative solutions to exciting problems — he recently developed conversational AI for robots.

For the last five years, Matthew has worked with Blade to develop new ways of teaching design-thinking and innovation to both MIT students and experienced professionals. He’s applying his machine learning and computer science skills to build out the data model for the BK Innovation Assessment.

Mike Ahnemann

Mike loves creating successful tech products and built his career around using new technologies to solve big problems — from some of the largest deployments of speech recognition software (T-Mobile, Bank of America), to websites and mobile apps that help 15 million climbers, hikers, mountain bikers, and backcountry skiers find a route and get outside (Adventure Projects).

He’s passionate about leading innovation, finding the balance between vision creation and collaborative execution, and he’s held leadership roles in organizations ranging from small startups to a 12,000 employee company.