Speaker announcement: Tamara Carleton

About Tamara

Tamara Carleton, PhD, is an award-winning professor, industry advisor, and author of radical innovation and strategic foresight. As the founder and CEO of Innovation Leadership Group, Tamara helps leaders and teams to build innovation capacity and map bold futures. She is the rare kind of leader who truly works globally and multidisciplinary.

As a professor of practice, Tamara is on the faculty of multiple business schools and technical universities around the world. Tamara holds the UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Leadership for Innovative and Better Futures at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico and was recognised as one of the Top 50 Women Leaders in Education of 2023 by Women We Admire.

Tamara has written several seminal books on innovation, including Building Moonshots: 50+ Ways to Turn Radical Ideas into Reality, Inventing the Almost Impossible, and Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation. She holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Get to know Tamara even more at tamaracarleton.com or on LinkedIn.

The talk: Building a Moonshot Mindset

When should your team go bigger, and what are some ways to take visionary action? In this inspirational session, hear Tamara Carleton introduce the moonshot mindset and some ways for turning radical ideas into reality, drawing from her recent book Building Moonshots which the Financial Times described as "a much-needed resource for our era of uncertainty".

Why I look forward to this talk

A couple of months ago we were thinking about the best way to kick-start myConf 2024. We wanted someone who was not afraid to take big swings. Someone whose thinking was bold and edgy, preferably across different areas. But who could this person be?

We looked all over the globe … and then we found what we were looking for 10 kilometres from my home! (At least part of the year, when she’s not at Stanford.) The speaker to kick off myConf this year is of course Tamara Carleton, author of the book “Building Moonshots”!

A personal reflection on Tamara’s book is that it talks quite a bit about DARPA. We did some work for DARPA many years ago, but I have almost not heard them mentioned since. Now all of a sudden they’re “everywhere”, not the least in Tamara’s book. I remember them saying something along the lines of "We only work with impossible projects." Sounds like a moonshot organization, doesn’t it?

Having a moonshot idea every month or so isn’t the hard bit. The real challenge is turning one of them into reality. At her talk at myConf, Tamara will tell you plenty about ways to accomplish just that. I think humankind needs more moonshot minds and more moonshots. Even when those journeys don’t succeed the whole way, they create ripple effects. And sometimes they work and move us all a big step towards a better situation!

Perhaps you and your team could get inspiration for a moonshot in May and start your journey in June?

/Jimmy Nilsson, CEO and Consultant at factor10