A festival of innovation and thought leadership

About AMPLIFY 11, 6-10 June 2011, Sydney, Australia

“From a humble experiment in knowledge exchange in 2005, AMPLIFY has grown into a week-long biannual festival enjoyed by more than 3500 employees, leaders, board members and invited guests, and that’s not counting the online audience. This unique learning event has become a powerful amplifier of our organisational thinking, learning and culture. This is one of many reasons why the AMP Leadership Team continues to invest in and grow AMPLIFY year on year.

For our people, AMPLIFY creates a powerful ‘knowledge market’ where we can openly exchange ideas with the foremost thinkers in the world, dabble with futuristic concepts and experiences way beyond our comfort zones, and experiment with emerging technologies to understand how these could add value for our customers and our business.”  Lee Barnett, CIO

Link to AMPLIFY 09 here http://www.amplify.amp.com.au( Website for AMPLIFY 11 is currently under construction)

Theme for 2011: EVERYTHING CONNECTS

Following on the 2007 theme of Collaboration, and the 2009 theme of Convergence and Emergence, AMPLIFY 11 will be themed “EVERYTHING CONNECTS”. AMPLIFY 11 will explore how ubiquitous and pervasive connectivity, real-time streams of data, mobility, networks, relationships and data visualisation, augmented reality and the “internet of things” are transforming human interaction, services and transactions and redefining business models. 

AMPLIFY 11 will examine these trends through the lens of our business as pre-eminent Financial Services and Wealth Management company in Australia.

Who speaks at AMPLIFY?

AMPLIFY attracts an enviable blend of the foremost thought leaders from all over the world and across a range of disciplines to share the cutting edge of research and technological evolution, and implications for financial services. Past speakers ( a small selection shared here) include:

• Jamais Cascio, Research fellow at the Institute for the Future
  
• Dr Jane McGonigal, Director of Games Design, Institute for the Future- a global thought leader in future scenarios forecasting and mass collaborative problem-solving


• Michael Schrage, Author “Serious Play”, Research Fellow MIT eMedia Lab


• Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of DEMO, co-founder Guidewire Group


• Dr BJ Fogg, Researcher, Innovator, Founder Persuasive Technologies Lab, Stanford University


• Dr Richard Satava, Programme Manager bio-medicine DARPA, Prof of Surgery, Washington Univ and Medicine Futurist


• Dr Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence


• Pete Williams, Partner & Chairman Deloitte Innovation Council, CEO Deloitte Digital


• Dr Amantha Imber, PHD in Science of Creativity, Chief Inventologist and Inventium


• Dr James Gardner, Author “How to Future-proof a bank”, Chief Technology Officer for largest Public Service Dept in UK, Thought Leader Gov 2.0


• Spike Jones, Social Media Strategist, Storyteller second to none, Board of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association of America)


• David Vaskevitch, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Corporation

Beyond the keynote presentations, we also offer a number of workshops for those wanting a deeper learning experience, and the popular EXPO on Friday 10 June will again buzz with emerging technologies and face-to-face experimentation, many of which ultimately make their way to adoption by our organisation.

Who attends AMPLIFY?

AMPLIFY is pretty unique. It’s NOT a commercial conference and AMP does not run it as a revenue exercise- its an investment in our organizational learning and an “open innovation exercise”. We offer this rich land immersive earning opportunity to everyone and anyone of AMP’s 3500 leaders and employees, our 2000 Financial Planners, our clients and business partners. Anyone can register, and sessions run throughout the day- from pre-work hours through lunch times till after hours –providing freedom of choice and flexibility, with some repeats. About 300 places are made available to the public on an application basis.

We converge both the physical and the virtual AMPLIFY through our website where anyone can subscribe to and participate in blogs, video content and twitter conversations throughout and beyond the AMPLIFY Festival, no matter where they are in the world. We plan to link up with the TEDX programme in 2011.

Curatorial approach to AMPLIFY

The programme is designed to engage both heart and mind, logic and emotion, theory and practice, serious learning and fun. Here is what we typically offer in the mix:

• The Speaker Stream offers 45-minute keynote presentations followed by Q&A, supplemented by live streamed audio-casts and twitter streams


• The one-day EXPO transforms AMP office common areas into a vibrant market of ideas and emerging technologies for participants to try out – presented by employee teams, partners, vendors, entrepreneurs and R&D institutions.


• Deep-dive workshops with specialists in selected areas of particular interest to our business.


• The Technology on Tap pub night offers after-hours infotainment as Australia’s leading PhD researchers explain what they’re studying, why we should care and how it will help make the world a better place-in 2 minutes! Audience votes determine a cash prize to help fund ongoing research.


• We actively partner to amplify AMPLIFY, and in 2011 we will by partnering with the Lowy Institute and the Vivid Sydney and Creative Sydney Festivals produced by Events NSW, The City of Sydney as well as the Lowy Institute.


• Creativity Tapas offering hands-on learning workshops looking at cultural trends, decentralised production and creative execution enabled by mass collaboration technologies, and immersion in creative pursuits, eg music, crafts, art, multimedia


• We also offer sponsorship opportunities for brands who want to be associated with specific elements of the programme or the festival at large. Past sponsors include CSC, KPMG, Microsoft. For 2011, we are also in negotiation with Events NSW, Tata Consulting Services, Cisco, and TEDX.

My research interests

Given the theme of AMPLIFY 11 as “Everything Connects”, I am interested in how emerging technologies are opening up new ways of doing things, interacting, connecting, communicating, transacting, sharing, collaborating, creating, producing, learning, working. Particularly, the way this shifts and disrupts social constructs like privacy, choice, control, security, methods of production, organization of labour, corporate structures and leadership models, geographical boundaries, intellectual property, competition, community and civic participation, design of physical spaces, governance, and behavioral economics.

The advances in search (speed, sentiment, scale, filters, type of content, real time news streams), storage and secure access (cloud), and connectivity via networks in real time from any device anywhere anytime and anyhow – and the ability to track that connectivity visually, as well as nano-and bio-medicine and synthetic solutions have application to our business in the following areas:

• commercial building & shopping centre management,


• actuarial calculation of risk, design of new financial products and services,


• value and speed of information and speed of share market trades for our trading rooms,


• re-imagining distribution channels,


• bundling of services with other industries,


• design of business models


• how we design and organise work,


• how we attract, re-train and retain the right skills,


• how we operate for scale advantage AND for agility and speed to market.

I am interested in seeing how some of these ground-shifting technologies work, and in discussing these with social scientists and anthropologists to understand what it could mean in terms of social impact and our business, as well as venture capital firms. In the context of the above explanation, specific R&D themes include:

• computer-assisted persuasion,


• Health solutions, nano-medicine, social health networks


• human + machine intelligence and interaction,


• algorithmic analysis of streaming news, social and location-based networks,


• data mining and visualisation and real-time intelligent search,


• innovation in devices for interaction eg mobile, speech recognition, sensing, haptics, speech indexing and enhanced human-human interaction,


• automation of low value routine tasks

My research trip: 30 June to 27 July 2010

I will be visiting San Francisco, Seattle, Aspen (Ideas Festival), Boston (World Future Society Conference) , London, Oxford (TED Global), Bangalore, Chennai, Beijing and Shanghai (World Expo). I have opportunities in my schedule to meet up with our existing business partners, Thought leaders, visit R&D Centres and universities.My itinerary can be viewed at http://www.tripit.com/trip/public/id/A604F3B98AF1

About AMP

More at www.amp.com.au. AMP is a leading wealth management company operating in Australia and New Zealand, with selective investment management activities in Asia (through AMP Capital Investors) and a growing banking business in Australia. AMP has two core business units:

• AMP Financial Services which provides financial planning advice,superannuation, retirement savings and income products, investments, risk insurance and selected banking products; and


• AMP Capital Investors which manages investments for clients across all themajor asset classes including equities, fixed interest, infrastructure, property including a number of shopping centres, diversified funds and multi-manager funds.

In Australia, AMP is a leading provider of retail and corporate superannuation and retirement income products. We have one of the largest planner forces in Australia and New Zealand. AMP is one of the region’s largest investment managers, with more than $114 billion in assets under management (as at 31 December 2009). AMP has:

• around 795,000 shareholders


• more than 3.6 million customers


• more than 3,500 employees


• more than 2,000 financial planners in Australia and New Zealand.

About my role

I specialise in change. Specifically, change to achieve a quantifiable shift in an innovative business culture, employee engagement and business performance and growth. Through the AMPLIFY Innovation & Thought Leadership Festival that I curate and produce every 2 years, we set imagination on fire with fresh and futuristic thinking. This is a major catalyst for change leading to business innovation, adoption of emerging technologies, entrepreneurial growth.

Through the Idea Frontier employee innovation programme, employees can effect change by planting their ideas into a smart system where they can grow, be pruned, expanded, bundled, propagated, weeded, harvested and/or taken to market by tapping into the collective intelligence and joint efforts of the entire organisation.

Through social media inside the company we ignite new relationships, collaboration and productivity. Change is catalysed through early experimentation with emerging technologies eg hardware/ devices/ interfaces and software eg Cloud-solutions, SaaS, Twitter, Yammer, wikis, blogs, team collaboration spaces, podcasts, and other community-based initiatives including Social Media Cafes, Blogger meet-ups, barcamps, innovation campaigns, employee short film festivals and other User-generated Content campaigns.

We set hearts and minds on fire by providing immersive experiences for creative learning, team bonding, personal growth and skills development. Examples include storytelling workshops, music jam sessions, group collaboration challenges, painting, scuplting, dancing, improv theatre and rich media production. This creates a change of heart!

We douse the skeptics with measurable ROI- the adoption of new strategy, implemented ideas, new products and services, business process improvements, our innovation pipeline, and a 43% positive change in employee engagement and culture over a period of 10 years to a high-performance culture benchmarked to world’s best companies.

In a nutshell, we catalyse a little magic every time.

My contact details:

(My LinkedIn profile is here: http://au.linkedin.com/in/innovationculturechange ).

Annalie Killian, AMP, Sydney, Australia. Tel: +61(02) 92575000 email: annalie underscore killian at ampdot com dot au