2026 Speakers

About Jane

Founder and Head of Creative Innovation at the leading independent marketing agency THINKHOUSE, and founder of The Youth Lab, an insights and C-Suite advisory practice that demystifies youth culture and future-proofs some of the world’s largest organisations through insights, strategy and innovation work.

About Joel

Joel runs copy and creative studio Common Miracles, and works with brands across luxury, charity, B2B and beyond, with expertise in naming, voice, messaging, editorial, and campaigns. He’s allergic to bland ideas and verbal landfill, and loves working with brilliant designers who feel the same. In 2022, he authored Idea Tactics – a creative thinking card deck used by teams at organisations like Nike, LEGO, and the UK government. And he’s now developing an all-new toolkit called Ideas On Acid. He regularly collaborates on projects with Emily Penny, founder of Becolourful and Joel’s co-author on the Fully Saturated report – an investigation of design agency positioning, published in 2025.

About Emily

Emily heads up brand voice studio Becolourful and works with people-based businesses where expertise is the product. That includes positioning and copywriting for consultants, agencies, communities, and social enterprises. She is fascinated by businesses at the edges and intersections of disciplines, future business models, the role of business in social change, and how brand thinking can support these opportunities. She has spent 25 years working in branding, sitting on award juries for the Design Week Awards, D&AD, and Brand Impact Awards. She has an MA marketing and has lectured on branding at London Metropolitan University and spoken on webinars and podcasts for the DBA, Creative Boom and Small Spark Theory. In 2024, she launched her brand positioning framework, BrandStrand® and in 2025 she co-authored Fully Saturated, a report on agency positioning examining major trends in the design sector. Design agency clients include HB, Some Bright Spark, We Pioneer, Naked, and Sister Mary.

Innovation Design: Transforming industry signals into scalable solutions

Innovation Design is driving change in industries and organisations. Instead of starting with a product design brief, you must dive into social and social trends to identify weak signals that hint at future opportunities. Innovation design involves working in multidisciplinary teams to develop concepts and validate their human desirability, technical feasibility and commercial viability at the same time. It's about having an entrepreneurial mindset and a keen eye for emerging technologies, to create groundbreaking products and services that meet future market needs. In this talk I will describe how we’ve developed this discipline at the Dock, Accenture’s Global R&D hub, and demonstrate its impact on our Public Services clients.

About Connor

Connor is a fan of wobbly career paths. A graduate of visual communications, he’s worked as a digital designer, founder, academic, R&D scientist and design director. Human cognition and interaction with systems has been the common theme across these roles. As Innovation Director at the Dock, he now works with industries to identify, prototype and incubate digital solutions that will transform their sectors.