Recently we were delighted to host our inaugural Singapore event, the Beta & Beyond Innovation Series, in partnership with Accenture. Since launching Beta & Beyond in Australia in 2013, we’ve held over a dozen of these events, with the series ethos being ‘Ideas That Move Markets’.

Our first event in Asia was themed ‘Innovation Adoption – A Global, Regional and Local Perspective’ and we were pleased to curate a line up of speakers to present the most exciting, innovative and thought provoking angles on this topic. Joining us were Jason Pellegrino of Google, Kell Jay Lim of GrabTaxi and Mark Collis of PlaceAR.

The aim of Beta & Beyond is to allow leading organisations to discover innovation that is occurring at the grassroots level of relevant industries, both locally and globally. A full house saw an intimate opportunity for our audience, a mix of C-Suite and Functional Heads, hear the presentations before a discussion is opened up inviting Q&A.

Our event posed the question – ‘What innovation means to you and how to adopt it into – not just into your business practice – but also your cultural DNA.’

A huge thank you to our host, Scott Bales, author and leading digital and innovation evangelist. Scott provided a highly relevant and compelling insight into innovation in the region and contributed to thoughtful discussion and additional insights across the evening.

SPEAKERS:
Kell Jay Lim – GrabTaxi (Country Manager)
Kell Jay helps lead one of the fastest growing start-ups in the region and a great success story. As most people know, GrabTaxi is a well funded mobile app and social enterprise with a mission to revolutionise the way people commute by leveraging smartphone technology and the smart use of Big Data. GrabTaxi believes that business and social value can be achieved in parallel. Kell Jay gave us a privileged view of GrabTaxi’s impressive rate of growth, what drives them (excuse the pun) and how they aim to scale both locally and regionally in the near future.

Jason Pellegrino – Google (Head of Strategy)
Amongst several perspectives including Google X – the company’s lab for secret, weird and wonderful projects, Jason brought a great angle to the event, and was able to contextualise the theme of Innovation. Through inspiring the audience with a polished presentation he allowed us to understand the capacity that has driven Google’s success, future projects and how individuals and companies can find relevant applications in their own industries.

Mark Collis – PlaceAR (Founder)
Mark Collis brought a great ‘grass roots’ feel with a presentation of their not-yet-launched startup PlaceAR, an augmented reality app that allows people to leave messages in the ether to either a closed group or publicly. Their presentation expanded the mind as discussion led to its hugely practical applications not only for private use, but for tourism, discovery, and content industries while potentially allowing cross-generational messages to be sent and received.

We continue to build new events for Beta & Beyond in 2015 and we look forward to welcoming a range of hosts, speakers and guests to the next event. For more information on Beta & Beyond please contact sydney@mitchellake.com or luke@mitchellake.com