Our Trainers

Jonathan Reichental

Award-winning technology leader with a long career working with urban innovation and blockchain technology in private and public sector. In 2017 he was named one of the top 100 CIOs in the world. Reichental works with his teams to apply technology innovation in organizations to create new value, and is a frequent public speaker on a wide range of technology and business related topics.

Bas Boorsma

Bas Boorsma is the managing director of Rainmaking Urban, a company within the global Rainmaking group dedicated to smart & sustainable community facilitation. Bas is also founder & ceo of TASC. Prior to Rainmaking Urban, Bas served in various global and regional leadership positions at Cisco, among others, as the company’s digitization leader for the Northern European region. Bas has over sixteen years of experience in smart community engagements. Bas is also the author of the well acclaimed book “A New Digital Deal” – www.anewdigitaldeal.com.

Antoni Vives

As former deputy mayor of Barcelona, Antoni Vives, has for years been in charge of the city’s Smart City development as head of the Urban Habitat in Barcelona. Today, Antoni Vives has established the consulting company City Transformation Agency, advising cities and governments worldwide. Vivesis world-recognised for his new and innovative approaches to city development.

Maja Yhde

Maja Yhde has broad experience in leading Smart City projects at the intersection of the private, public and knowledge sector. Through her work with improving municipal Smart City competencies, she has gained valuable insights into both the challenges and possibilities within the field. Working passionately with processes and development, Maja brings stakeholders together, facilitates partnerships and creates a foundation for municipalities’ Smart City efforts at a strategic as well as practical level.

Kim Brostøm

Kim Brostrømhas had overall responsibility for establishing DOLL Living Lab in close collaboration with the Danish Energy Agency, the Capital Region, Region Zealand, Technical University of Denmark and +50 private companies. Kim is educated Master Sc in Business Economics and have previously held positions as Project Director, IT Director and Head of Development for large Danish companies and media organizations.

Mariela Atanassova

Mariela Atanassova is an innovation facilitator, collaboration designer and technologist with years of experience in the financial industry. She has hands-on experience with innovation management and processes, and particularly open and collaborative innovation, product innovation and culture change. Mariela is a technologist specialising in cyber security, and while no longer a practitioner in this field she still speaks on the subject.

Maaike Osieck

Maaike Osieck has worked for the public-private partnership Amsterdam Smart City since 2009 as Head of Communications & Engagement and Head of Partnerships. Working on the strategy, brand and network which has grown to 19 partners, 250+ projects, 300+ organizations and 5000+ innovators. Maaike is also the co-initiator of WeMakeThe.City, a five-day innovation festival. In 2017 she founded Mighty4, to make a difference in more urban innovation projects in Amsterdam and abroad.

Raffaele Gareri

Raffaele Gareri is the Chairman of TSCAI and a public manager – the director of Innovation, Tourism and HR departments in Brescia. He has led a major implementation of a public initiative to tackle the digital divide in rural areas of the province of Brescia, providing wireless internet connection in more than 120 small municipalities. Recently he launched the development of smart lighting project and Lora digital infrastructure in 28 small municipalities.

Gordon Feller

Gordon Feller has worked in emerging technologies for three decades, most recently consulting to the executive office on projects that harness the power of data (whether in the cloud; via mobile networks from IoT-enabled end-points; other advanced technologies) to solve complex problems.

Martin Brynskov

Martin Brynskov has an unique insight into the latest trends in the Smart City area. Brynskov manages to see and understand the connections between the different layers of Smart City initiatives – whether it is organizational or technical layers – and connect them while providing a broad understanding of the couplings, and how best to work with Smart City.

John Baekelmans

Prior to his current position at IMEC, John Baekelmans has held various global leadership positions at Cisco within Engineering, Services and the M&A departments and has authored numerous US and European patents.

Diana Bowman

Diana M. Bowman is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Her research analyzes and informs the development of smarter governance and regulation of innovation in order to simultaneously enhance creativity, improve public health, and stimulate deliberation of the ethical, legal, and societal dimensions of emerging technologies.

Bob Bennett

Bob Bennett became the Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Kansas City, Missouri, in January 2016 after a 25-year career in the US Army. Here he leads the Smart City initiatives. Kansas City’s initiatives earned an Edison Award (Gold) for “Collective Disruption” and civic innovation in 2017, and Bob was named one of GovTech’s25 Dreamers, Doers and Drivers in 2018. He is currently working on plans to extend Smart City infrastructure to be the first fully Connected Vehicle Fleet in a municipality.

Hock Yun Khoong

Hock Yun Khoong, a Harvard Business School alumnus, has 30 years experience in the public and private sectors. As Senior Advisor in Tembusu Partners, a private equity firm, he specializes in Blockchain investments. He was the Chief Digital Evangelist in Singapore’s InfocommMedia Development Authority (IDA), where he among several nation-wide programs conceived the Smart Nation initiative in 2014, and implemented Singapore’s 3-tier, open access, nation-wide broadband network from 2003 to 2013.

Benoît Felten

Benoît Felten has worked in Telecoms for over 20 years and is a recognized broadband expert. Felten has recently expanded from telecom into various forms of public involvement – including smart communities. His focus is on the underlying infrastructure needed to achieve a smart community vision, the funding and governance models and the various public private collaboration models that empowers smart communities. He is based in Hong Kong and is head of the boutique research and consultancy Diffraction Analysis.

Stefan Slembrouck

Stefan Slembrouck, a graduate philosopher and economist, has been a multinational business development manager in global companies before he entered the energy market in 2009 as a director Germany for Alliander, the largest public network company in the Netherlands and co-founder of Amsterdam Smart City. He launched Allego Germany, meanwhile one of Europe’s top ev-charge-point operators, initiated 450connect GmbH, a telecom company dedicated to smart grid services and was deeply involved in the development of public lighting into an urban IoT solution. His focus now is on the digitalization of critical infrastructures as the technical backbone of smarter communities in collaboration with municipal utilities and network companies. He lives in Germany and was appointed member of the board of the German Federate Smart City Association in 2018.

Peter Bjørn Larsen

Peter Bjørn Larsen is the Director and Owner of Smart City Insights Aps, which he started in October 2017. In the first 9 months, Peter has led smart city strategy and implementation projects in Canada and Saudi-Arabia, conducted data ecosystem assignments in the UK and Denmark, and worked with several companies and organizations on data strategies in France, US, Germany and Denmark, on how their data can be used in a smart city context.

Daniel Gerber

Self-employed business consultant and organizational developer with focus on integrated management systems. As an ecologist, he has been accompanying various companies on their way to sustainable business for nearly 20 years, and since 1989 he has been a lecturer at various higher technical schools.

His extensive know-how in the field of team development, communication and in the management of change processes completes his profile as a coach.

As a member of the Parliament of the City of Wil, he knows the political processes in Switzerland very well.

Ann Marcus

Ann Marcus is a Smart City expert with a background in communications and Social Sciences. Ann Marcus has developed years of Smart City thought-leadership & communications experience at Cisco. She is the editor of “A New Digital Deal”. Based out of Portland, USA.

Leen Balcaen

Leen Balcaen is leading the EMEAR Industry Solutions team at HERE Technologies, providing in-depth insights and expertise on how location and location-based services play a key role across industries and sectors like Smart Cities, Transport and Logistics, Retail, Insurance, Media and more.

Leen is a global leader with more than 15 years of experience in digital mapping, location-based services, points of interest, probes and search. In the last two years she focused especially on areas like IoT, SaaS, Public Sector and Smart Cities.

Theodoor van der Klaauw

Theodoor van der Klaauw is an IT-management graduate from the Rotterdam School of Management, who researched Public-Private Partnerships. Various roles in software platform companies provided him with the necessary skills to analyse the IoT and data platform industry. His findings help building a comparative understanding of vendor offerings and technology solutions amongst stakeholders in the space city space.