The Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) announced international speaker, consultant and author Marina Gorbis will deliver the keynote address at its fourth annual industry outlook conference, Predict, Sept. 11, at the Intercontinental Hotel Chicago.
“Marina’s understanding of global economies and social structures provides a unique perspective that will greatly serve every executive sitting in that room,” said CEIR President and CEO, Brian Casey, CEM. “The work she has done with helping organizations not only forecast but utilize future trends is very cutting edge.”
Gorbis is the executive director of the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a nonprofit research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley. In her 14 years with IFTF, she has helped hundreds of organizations in business, education, government and philanthropy to improve innovation capacity, develop strategies and design new products and
services.
Her current research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries – also the subject of her book, “The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World.”
The Nature of the Future introduces us to the emerging relationship-driven or socialstructed economy, where individuals harness the powers of new technologies to create new, social models of products, services and wealth.
Gorbis argues that the Internet’s low transaction costs are facilitating distributed social solutions to some of our most immediate needs and our most intractable problems. She shows how pioneers are filling gaps and doing the seemingly impossible by reinventing business, education, medicine, banking, government and even scientific research.
A native of the Ukraine and equally at home in Silicon Valley, Europe, India and Kazakhstan, Gorbis is particularly well-suited to see things from a global viewpoint. She has written for BoingBoing, FastCompany and Harvard Business Review.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in public policy from University of California at Berkeley.
Predict is an executive-level, one-day event featuring a highly-intensive and interactive program where speakers will engage attendees by providing a forecast for the CEIR Index’s 14 industry sectors for the remainder of this year and through 2016.
The application and registration process is now open at www.ceir.org/predict.
