Welcome to the IO2026 lineup of keynotes. We’ll be announcing more each week, so check back often…
David Bland
David J. Bland is the co author of Testing Business Ideas and founder of Precoil. He helps startup founders and corporate innovation leaders make faster decisions by breaking down, sharing and testing risk. Testing Business Ideas, co authored with Alexander Osterwalder, has sold over 100,000 copies in more than 20 languages, and is widely used by startups, corporate venture capital teams, and enterprise innovation groups. He gives back to the startup community by lecturing at Stanford, Yale and Harvard as well as running workshops for early stage founders at Draper University in Silicon Valley.
Julie Anne Crommett
Julie Ann Crommett is a powerhouse in media and storytelling, driving transformative change at the intersection of entertainment, business, and culture. As the Founder and CEO of Collective Moxie, a global storytelling, media strategy and audience engagement agency, she advises top studios, brands, and creatives on innovative strategies that reshape industries. Previously, she led multicultural audience engagement at Disney, influencing billion-dollar hits like Encanto, Black Panther, and Raya and the Last Dragon, and spearheaded global DEI initiatives at Google and NBCUniversal.
Jacob Ward
Jacob Ward is a longtime technology journalist. He’s been a correspondent for NBC News, Al Jazeera, CNN and PBS, and was the editor-in-chief of Popular Science. In 2022, he published The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, which predicted the commercial AI moment we’re in. He’s just finished as a reporter-in-residence at The Omidyar Network, and hosts The Rip Current podcast.
Robyn Bolton
Robyn Bolton is the Founder & Chief Navigator at MileZero, a consultancy that helps leaders turn uncertainty into growth and is the author of Unlocking Innovation: A Leader’s Guide for Turning Bold Ideas into Tangible Results (2025, Page Two). She is also an Assistant Professor at Boston College and The Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She previously worked at Innosight, BCG, and Procter & Gamble, where she helped develop and launch Swiffer. Robyn holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Marketing from Miami University. Her articles and perspective have been featured in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review Online, The New York Times, and NPR’s Marketplace. In 2026, she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar List as one of thirty thinkers to watch in the coming year.
Elliott Parker
Elliott Parker is CEO of Alloy Partners, a venture builder that co-creates advantaged startups with corporations and entrepreneurs. He previously launched dozens of startups at High Alpha, the pioneering venture studio, and helped Fortune 100 firms design and execute growth strategies at Clayton Christensen’s firm Innosight. Elliott is passionate about helping big organizations move fast and think boldly—and wrote The Illusion of Innovation to inspire transformation through bold experimentation.
Tristian Kromer
As founder and CEO, Tristan works with innovation teams and leaders to get from idea to impact. An experienced startup entrepreneur and corporate innovator, Tristan has helped leaders adopt data-driven decision making, coached governments developing startup ecosystems, led disruptive innovation teams, calculated innovation ROI, and trained coaches worldwide. Tristan has helped organizations ranging from nonprofits (ChildFund, Cancer Research UK, Kiva) to government agencies (the U.S. and the U.K.) to some of the biggest brands on the planet (Unilever, Target, Salesforce, Walmart, LinkedIn). Tristan has worked with more than 30 technology accelerators worldwide, including in Norway, Vietnam, Ireland, Estonia, and Mexico.
Erin Stadler
Erin Stadler has spent 20 years studying the same problem from different angles: why organizations that adopt new ways of working so rarely change how they actually work. As COO of Boomtown Innovation, she spent the last decade building that answer from the inside — designing and operating innovation platforms across health tech, connectivity, media and sports, including the Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech Accelerator, which across five cohorts generated over 250 pilots, partnerships and commercial deals with partners including NASCAR, PGA Tour, Premier League and Notre Dame. In an industry where the average corporate accelerator partnership lasts three years, hers lasted more than twice that. Erin brings to IO Summit a practitioner's perspective on what it actually takes to build innovation programs that last — and why the answer is almost never found in the program itself.
Ted Ullrich
Theodore Ullrich (Ted) is an engineer and designer and Founding Partner of Tomorrow Lab®, an internationally recognized hardware invention studio based in NYC. Tomorrow Lab was recognized on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine in 2014 as Top Tech Innovators. He regularly speaks on the application of science, design, and entrepreneurship to create new hardware technology products that solve big problems. He holds a Masters of Industrial Design from Georgia Tech, a Bachelors of Inventive Design Engineering from Purdue University, and has taught design studio courses at Georgia Tech, Drexel University, the School of Visual Arts NYC, the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, and Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Dan HASSENPLUG
Dan Hassenplug is the VP of User Experience at Hudl, where he leads product design and user experience across all business units. His background spans design, product strategy, acquisitions and building high-growth SaaS teams, giving him a rare ability to bridge creative vision with strategic execution. He previously spent a decade at Paylocity in senior roles spanning UX leadership, product management and new product development. Dan believes great product design leadership is about empowering people, embedding user insight into strategy from discovery through go-to-market, and obsessing over the details that make products truly great. He's known for telling stories that connect design and product to customer outcomes, cutting through complexity to move work forward, and building alignment across functions. Dan and his family reside in the Chicago suburbs.
Josie Schafer, PhD
Josie Schafer joined the University of Nebraska at Omaha as the Director of the Center for Public Affairs Research (CPAR) in 2018, drawn to its strong history and reputation as Nebraska’s go-to source for expert data and analysis, particularly in their role as the State Data Center for the United States Census Bureau. Since then, she has focused on advancing the organization by cultivating community-engaged research projects, expanding community and professional development events, and committing to a communications strategy that aligns with CPAR’s action-oriented approach. Recent projects lead by Schafer include the Entrepreneurship in Nebraska report, the 2023 Nebraska Healthcare Workforce report, the Nebraska Community Foundation Youth Survey, and policy analyses for the Planning Committee of the Nebraska State Legislature. Schafer gives over 40 invited presentations a year and responds to even more media and requests for Census data.
Eric Ries
Over the last two decades, Eric Ries’s ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader’s Guide; and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; the Lean Startup Co, which teaches and supports the implementation of Lean Startup; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. On his podcast, The Eric Ries Show, he talks to guests including world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives working to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.
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