International Conference on Creativity and Innovation in Decision Making and Decision Support (CIDMDS 2006)

The keynote speakers at the conference will be Rex Brown (George Mason University), Osvaldo Garcia (Systems Design, Santiago de Chile) and Babis Mainmelis (London Business School). In the invited panel for the discussion, they will be joined by Garrick Jones (London School of Economics and Ludic Group LLP) and Lewis Pinault (BOX, London).

Rex Brown

Rex Brown is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Public Policy at George Mason University. Trained as a social scientist and statistician, he has spent his career aiding decision makers, especially government and business leaders, and developing the necessary methodology.

As chairman of Decision Science Consortium, his consulting projects included closing nuclear plants, shaping foreign treaties, selecting industrial products, evaluating congressional legislation, high profile expert testimony and environmental regulation. On the faculties of Harvard, Cambridge and LSE, he taught in statistics, psychology and management. He was on the cover of the Illustrated London News and received the annual award of the Institute of Statisticians.

His tool development has resulted from cross-fertilizing research and application. Resulting innovations involved matching aid to organization, structuring decision models, characterizing decider wisdom and knowledge, plural evaluation, qualitative reasoning, managing risk research, and second-order uncertainty assessment.

He recently published Rational Choice and Judgment: Decision analysis for the decider. His talk will focus on the usefulness of decision aid and decision aiding research, and pay particular attention to assuring aid essentials, reviewing past failures and evaluating prospective tools in an organizational context.

Osvaldo García de la Cerda

Osvaldo García de la Cerda is a professor at the Industrial Engineering Department of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, where has created diverse innovative programs for student education during 25 years. His research explores innovative methodologies to improve organisational learning through creativity and a ludic observatory.

His current research is on human re-engineering for action, enaction and communication in high management and in areas of poverty. More than two thousands students have participated in this program in the last five years, as well as people responsible for high management, CEO`s and policy makers in the transformation of their organizations.

He is the creator of LHEA (Hermeneutical Laboratory for emotion and action) and CIGAR Ltda. a meta-management boutique dedicated to organizational diagnosis and the design of high-level managers. He has consulted for actors with high responsibilities in Government in Chile and other Latin American countries, and also consulted for a variety of large public and private enterprises.

At the moment, he is working for an educational program for engineers integrating theatre as an element for designing organizational observation and action in top management. He is also involved in an educational program on conflict management for Chilean mediators. . He is frequently invited to talk about creative design management at academic centres in Chile, Latin America and Europe.

Garrick Jones

Garrick Jones is an academic, musician and businessman based in London. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art & Design and a Partner of The Ludic Group.

Garrick’s career has included being the Director of CGEY’s Innovation Centre – innovateUK (2000 – 2004) where he worked with organisations on Innovation Strategies using Collaborative Learning and Design. Before that Garrick worked for ten years as a Director of Ernst & Young’s Accelerated Solutions Environments (ASE).

Garrick’s academic research is focused on large scale group decision support systems for commerce and business, culture, education and community development, in which the design process is critical. Garrick has an MPhil from Oxford University. Garrick has worked in Europe, Africa, the United States and Asia. He has worked with teams to develop and launch Collaborative Environments in 12 countries and has worked on cultural change in the South African context.

As a musician he plays and composes - most recently collaborating with the artist Urs Fischer on a book and performances at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Kunsthaus, Zurich and the Camden Arts Centre, London..

Babis Mainemelis

Babis Mainemelis is assistant professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School where he teaches in the MBA, Sloan Fellows, and Ph.D. programmes.

His research explores creativity, play, and learning in organisations with an emphasis on the R&D and media industries. His work has been published in premier outlets of scholarly research in the fields of creativity and management, including the Academy of Management Review and Creativity Research Journal, in edited academic volumes, and it has also been commented upon in the popular press, including the Financial Times.

He has delivered lectures about creativity to diverse audiences, including Sonaecom, the London Media Summit, the Institute for Public Policy Research, the National Maritime Museum & Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and INSEAD.

Prior to joining London Business School Dr. Mainemelis taught in graduate business schools in the USA and worked at PictureWorks Technology, Inc., a digital imaging and real-time caption software firm in Danville, California. He holds degrees in Economics and Management from Aristotelian University, Greece, and the University of San Francisco, USA, and a Ph.D. in Organisational Behaviour from Case Western Reserve University, USA.

The title for Babis’ talk at the conference will be "Playfulness & Creativity in Decision Making."

Lewis Pinault

Lewis Pinault runs BOX, a focal point for research and innovative client engagement headquartered at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Previous Vice President of EDS, Lewis led their Consumer Industries & Retail business in Europe, complementing his earlier consulting activities as a Partner with Coopers & Lybrand in Hong Kong, as senior consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and as an independent finance and consumer industries consultant. Lewis speaks fluent Japanese, and led Gemini Consulting’s expansion into Asia.

His curiosity and drive for innovation and ethical, playful consulting engagements has led Lewis into many different work projects for smaller companies as well: He is a research practitioner with Lego’s Imagination Lab, is a previous Managing Director for the business artists, Group Partners and was Innovation Director for Proxicom and Dimension Data.

Lewis also has a keen, expansive academic interest. While completing a combined Juris Doctorate and Master of Science research programme at the University of Hawaii, he held a NASA Space Grant Graduate Fellowship, serving as a NASA Delegate to the Third UN Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in political science, Japanese and ocean engineering at MIT, and a Master’s degree in law and economics on a Fulbright Scholarship at the London School of Economics. Lewis is currently pursuing a PhD at the LSE, with a focus on the use of mediated spaces like BOX in resolving issues for human and robotic settlement in outer space.

Lewis is the author of Consulting Demons (HarperCollins), a Fortune Best Business Book 2000 whose challenge to the ethics and practices of the traditional consulting industry has been widely reviewed and hailed from Business Week to Fortune to CIO Magazine. His latest work, The Play Zone (HarperCollins 2004) focuses specifically on the use of advanced facilitation tools and techniques to tap into emergent energies and processes