Dr. Göran Carstedt

Dr. Göran Carstedt is chairman of The Natural Step International, a non-profit organization with a scientific approach to sustainable development. Dr. Carstedt joined the Clinton Climate Initiative in January 2007 as Senior Director of the C40 initiative and is engaged in the formation of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL) Global Network.

Dr. Carstedt is also an advisor and coach to various European, US and Asian organizations and serves as chairman and board member for several corporations. He is the former head of IKEA Retail Europe and served as a member of the IKEA Group Management Board from 1990-1997 and as President of IKEA North America from 1990-1995.

Before joining IKEA, Dr. Carstedt served for many years in different executive positions with Volvo. He joined Volvo in 1974 as Manager of Market Planning at the Car Division in Gothenburg, Sweden. He was Manager of tthe Corporate Planning Office at Volvo Headquarters, President of the Car Division at Volvo France SA in Paris, and President of Volvo Svenska Bil AB, the Swedish Volvo sales organization for cars, trucks, buses, spare parts, financial and computer services and car rentals. Dr. Carstedt has also served as a member of the Volvo Group Management Committee.

Steve Moore

Steve Moore is Director of the London based Big Society Network. The Network is the innovation platform for the UK’s Prime Minister’s big idea; to build the Big Society.  Steve was born and raised in Belfast where he co-wrote an acclaimed satirical review Now Before The Weather The War which toured the country to a mixture of rave reviews and mild bemusement. He joined the Government in 1987 and led a range of high profile employment and welfare initatives under the pioneering Lord Young.  He then moved to Australia where he worked with Time-Life and the great documentary film maker Ken Burns. Upon returning to London he worked on a range of large regeneration projects including London’s Bankside, the Thames Gateway and Deptford and Brixton City Challenges and became a Director of SOLOTEC and the Learning and Skills Council. Since 2002 he has established and led three start up businesses Why Not? , Ice 3 and Policy Unplugged. He has been employed as an advisor to  Microsoft, the RSA, the BBC, PWC, Department for Education and Skills, Enterprise UK, NESTA and UnLtd. Steve has curated and facilitated over 80 major conferences and festivals including 2gether, Reboot Britain and 2morro. Steve is a strategic adviser to Channel 4 Television and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Peter Aspden

Peter Aspden is the Financial Times’ arts writer, having previously been its arts editor for five years. He joined the paper in 1994, as deputy books and arts editor and a general feature writer on Weekend FT. He has written on numerous subjects, including travel, religion, politics, history, most art forms and sport: he covered the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, and the World Cup in France in 1998.

He was born in London in 1958, but spent much of his childhood in Greece, where his mother was born. He was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, before going into journalism. He joined the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1985, where he went on to become deputy editor. He has been writing a weekly column on contemporary culture since January 2004; it appears in the Life & Arts section every Saturday.

Elena Panaritis

Elena Panaritis spent years convincing policymakers, development organizations, and local stakeholders in Peru that transformation of informal property rights is possible and that it carries sustainable economic, financial and social dividends. The actual reform application though took only three years and succeeded in bringing over 9 million Peruvians into the formal economy. She has worked in numerous countries identifying informality and developed the methodology “Reality Check Analysis” as a diagnostic tool that leads to the tailored solution of transforming informality to robust formal markets. She captures that experience in her book Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and affirms her belief of triple-bottom-line model of social entrepreneurship as a catalyst for positive change.

Elena Panaritis has developed a property rights reform method revolutionizing policy application in economics. She successfully transformed informal property rights into vibrant, growing formal economic and social entities. She bases her work on rebuilding trust among all constituencies.

Kostas Grammatis

Kosta Grammatis is a visiting researcher at the MIT Media labs and the founder of ahumanright.org — an organization charged with bringing low cost internet access to the world. Kosta was the lead scientist for the video camera enabled prosthetic eye called the “eyeborg project.” and was awarded TIME Magazines best invention of 2009 for his work. He worked for Space Exploration Technologies and was the lead engineer of a satellite that is now currently in orbit. He likes big ideas.

Ioannis Ragkousis

Ioannis Ragkousis is a Greek politician. As from 7 October 2009 he is Minister for the Interior of Greece. Ioannis Ragkousis was born in 1965. He graduated in economics at the University of Thessaloniki and also has a postgraduate diploma from the University of Sussex. Before joining the Greek shadow cabinet in 2007, he was mayor of Paros, in the Cyclades.

Athena Andreadis

Athena is an Anglo-Greek singer songwriter born in London and raised in Greece. She is part of London’s melting pot and creative energy, collaborating, recording, performing and writing with international musicians and songwriters such as Chris Difford (Squeeze), Geoff Martyn (Travis), Chaz Jankel (Blockheads), Marti Pellow (Wet Wet Wet), Adam Levy (Norah Jones), Mike Rowe (Sheryl Crowe), Ben Trigg (Arctic Monkeys, Razorlight), Jamie Hartman (Ben’s Brother). London allowed her to express her creativity and become established, having received rave reviews by the British press and headlining sold out venues and festivals ranging from the South Bank Centre in London to Glastonbury. A one hour documentary about her voice & music entitled MyMusic aired on Channel 5 and SkyArts in 2008 with Athena being hailed as one of the leading new UK singers and songwriters.

Daily Mirror wrote about Athena “She’s got earthshaking looks and a talent to match. Listen closely and a startling originality emerges”, while The Guardian described her as “Brave and original. A remarkably fine singer songwriter.”

Athena will be performing a short, acoustic set of four songs, ahead of her full concert at Badminton the following evening (for more see www.facebook.com/Athenamusic)

Yiannis Giannarakis

Yiannis Giannarakis is an enterpreneur, active in electronic publishing and digital content since 1985. He was one of the founding members of the Greek leading internet portal www.in.gr where he acted as Managing Director for the first five years, from conception till its establishment as a major media factor. Among others he was Director of the Greek edition of National Geographic books and videos, newspaper collumnist and editor of various electronic and paper publications. Born 1959 in Alexandria, he studied Biology in Athens, never finished his PhD in Bioinformatics, and spends some weekends hiking, and mountain-top communicating with very low power in radiowaves.

Thodoris Georgakopoulos

Thodoris has worked on print and online media for more than a decade. Throughout this time he has developed a fascination with technology that borders on fanboyism. These days his main focus as Chief Internet Officer at IMAKO MEDIA SA, a leading media company in Greece, is to figure out how all these exciting new ways of consuming media will shape a market in turmoil.

In the past Thodoris has written a novel for young adults, has translated literature (including a book based on a popular Twitter feed), and has written professionally about books and gadgets. He still writes for lifestyle magazines and on the web, dabbles in painting and photography, and operates a small network of niche-targeted blogs. His latest book features long form non-fiction stories published in Esquire magazine during the past eight years.

Alexandros Damoulianos

Alexandros Damoulianos was born in 10-07-1990. He graduated from Ilion High School for Students with Disabilities. He is an undergraduate student at the School of Philosophy, University of Athens. He started writing poetry at the age of 14. Two years ago he participated in the festival EMOTION PICTURES with his own script for the short film “God on the horizon”, which was shown in many countries. Moreover, his first poetic collection, under the same title, is published under the aegis of the Secretariat General of Communication and Information. He was nominated for the award of will at “Life Awards”. He is a special needs person, with cerebral palsy and spastic quadriplegia.