FastForwardForum – Beyond Corona – What’s next?

We will not go back - in the future - we will not go back to the way healthcare was done before.

Pete Trainor

How do we learn from this COVID-19 on a global level? Can we actually design a process that’s far more effective with testing and using different resources?”

Prof. Dr. Shafi Ahmed

The pandemic makes a significant impact in people’s mental health.”

Dr. Doris Malischnig

I’m afraid we will have a pull-factor and I’m afraid we will have more pandemics happening.

Dr. Franz Gruber

So now with Covid-19 I’m really seeing the world kind of waking up to the way I have been receiving health care now for over nine years [at home].”

Robin Farmanfarmaian

What I am trying to do is to convey that confidence, that willinginess to take on this challenge and this mindset of self-efficacy to the people I’m interacting with.

Dhiraj Mukherjee

People are losing purpose but creating new purpose.

Arno Wohlfahrter

it is up to us to make sure that with the big players in each industry we push the right innovation agenda. Let’s embrace collaboration, believe that you are making a difference, take action and be the change you want to see.

Matteo Atti

Companies need to treat their consumers not as consumers but people. Who have values. Who want and expect more of companies, so they need to be ready to be more open and interact more.

Alicia Garcia Lopez

Don’t ignore facts of 50 years, true wealth lies in innovation so I think the best thing we can do is create an exit strategy that will fix our economy. This was the wake-up call we needed so badly.

Igor Beuker

Digital is going to be a massive part of the future. The online store is absolutely part of the future. Maybe this is life slowing us down.”

Heather Mills

The pandemic has exacerbated income inequality.

Cindy Gallop

It’s not only money that drives innovation, but also trust. If leaders put more trust in their employees, we would see a lot innovation.Trust is one of the most undervalued remedies.

Fred Koblinger

I am quite optimistic about how we are coming out of this. I think we are going to see incredible changes in how we look at business, how we look at climate, how we will look at the expectation just about how the people communicate.

Carla Johnson

We are in need full transparency.

Heinz Popovic

What I like about FFF is that communicating with like-minded disruptors can make innovation happen.

Heather Mills

My view is to disrupt, innovate technology as an enabler that supports and ultimately has the power – used correctly – to improve all of our lives.

Prof. Dr. Shafi Ahmed

The biggest hindrance in a company when it comes to innovation is that they don’t understand you can’t have both innovation and efficiency in the same pot, because by its very nature innovation is inefficient, trilinear, you never know what’s going to happen.

Carla Johnson

Diversity is what drives innovation and disruption.True innovation, true disruption is the result of many different mind-sets, perspectives, backgrounds, world-views, all coming together, constructive, creative conflict to get to a far better place than anyone of us gotten on their own. And the Fast Forward Forum is a perfect example of that.

Cindy Gallop

I have children and I’m really ashamed how we are going to pass on the planet. So I think we have the responsibility and technologies to reverse it and we should do it.

Igor Beuker

What FFF did for me was let’s look at it from a different vantage point which I wasn’t even expecting at this moment and that’s what all of us experienced that we can take forward with us, which is a real gift.

Dhiraj Mukherjee

Wow, what a location for a gathering of such wonderful minds. I spent three days pinching myself that I was there and that I was part of such a brilliant story.

Pete Trainor

The amazing thing about this gathering is bringing leaders from all kinds of industries together to create a dialogue that maybe wouldn't happen had you not invited all of us, had you not brought us together from different backgrounds.

Prof. Dr. Moran Cerf

I got inspired by the book of the Fast Forward Forum from last year. I signed up because I thought I really want to be part of this.

Peter Maximilian Stark

I'm delighted to be back. And one of the things that I know this last year has given me to think about is a lot about innovation and the role that it has in companies.

Carla Johnson

We want to challenge everyone, the speakers and the cool thinkers. What we want to do is to connect people. We want to see that the topic is growing. We want to see that if we have a discussion, something new is coming along.

Heimo Hammer

I have been a keynote motivational speaker around the world for over 25 years, The fast Forward forum was the first event where I came away feeling enlightened, inspired and educated by my eclectic esteemed colleagues...

Heather Mills

Schools and education in general aren’t teaching our children to be free-spirited. Do we need a rebellion in education to feed curious children?

Pete Trainor

As an angel investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, I'm prefer to surround myself with innovative, cutting edge thinkers and doers. The Fast Forward Forum is one of those few places I loved, simply because the conversations and people were interesting, innovative, and making a difference in the world. Huge bonus, the event experience itself was spectacular - food, venue, everything was amazing.

Robin Farmanfarmaian

We need to ask, when it comes to hybrid thinking, can all the ethical questions that come to mind when we talk about machines and machine learning, are the ethical processes of the past 100 years fit for purpose? Do we need to ask new questions or can we use the frameworks we have designed for the pre-digital/social age?

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Markus Hengstschläger

Our discussions on genetics and new health tools questions the ultimate responsibilities on scientific advancement – who is really ready to face the consequences of our discoveries? Who will help unprepared humans to handle the powerful tools we put in their hands? With life, we should take no shortcuts – just because we hear the sound of waves, we should not jump off a cliff as the fastest way to get to the water. We should continue looking for the sea, and finding the safest path to it.

Matteo Atti

There are lots and lots of conferences out there. There are even conference junkies who go from one group of thinkers to the next, sucking out the knowledge and becoming a Beautifully Evolved Professional (until they start making the people around them want to throw up) ...thankfully FastForwardForum is something entirely different. It’s not for conference junkies, it’s for big thinking Humans who want to be part of an experience. A truly wonderful few days in the company of incredible people, learning to process the changes of an ever-changing world.

Pete Trainor

In Silicon Valley we have a saying: if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product!

Robin Farmanfarmaian

If we want to talk about future, we need the strength and the humility to scale back. To unbuild ourselves and start a new build. As with everything involving building the future, it requires moving past the ruins of old glories and looking ahead, thankful to have all the raw materials and the experience to create something new. Again.

Matteo Atti

The healthcare system is fixated on solving problems and creating solutions or cures rather than in preventing disease and ill-health. There are great things to be said for the role of science and technology in the future of health, but we should also get back to the basics, and focus on prevention. For me, that starts with better nutrition, and that means better education.

Heather Mills

We’re all trying to move forward. It’s clear that the focus is not content. We have AI, but it’s clear that often the focus is not content. We need to have the collaboration of people [with technology].

Vincent Beaufils

There is a painful schism between our business personas, driven to higher and higher goals, with a global scope and potential in mind, and company values surpassing the trillions, and what remains of us after that chapter closes. As people move through the grinder of new business – accelerated, emphatic, media-obsessed – what happens to their internal compass? When you lift all anchors to take off on an open sea, where do you set harbour next?

Matteo Atti

Speaking with Markus after his talk, I was truly inspired by his idea that we must not just be optimistic, but also ‘possible-istic’. It is not just the idea that ‘this’ can be great but that we can all help change the future – it’s ours to help create. It’s time to ask – what can we do? We know what’s happening now, so what can we do with that knowledge. As someone once said: ‘Do good things and good things will happen’.

Alicia Garcia

The acceleration of a chaos brainstorming is incredible – we generated 12 ideas in 3 minutes, prepared a plan for the top idea in 2 minutes, and sold it in 15 seconds. Now… what? When the enthusiasm from winning comes off, are we ready to nurture the idea to its conclusion, and respond of the consequences? Who is the father and guardian of the idea: who commissioned it, who came up with the idea, or who ultimately uses it and makes it a reality? Who’s really in charge of the future? It is time to face the simple fact that we all are. Nobody’s in charge. Nobody’s innocent.

Matteo Atti

Heather touches upon two important points: that we must listen to ourselves and our bodies more – people have lost this; the future of nutrition has less to do with technology and more to do with your mind and the way that you use it, that the quality of food makes a real difference. The intensity of today’s farming and meat production concerns me. I am not a vegan, but good food should be about excellent ingredients and the right balance for you. I do worry about many of the additives that necessarily have to go into ready meals, even vegan ones.

Martina Hörmer

We need to raise the question as to whether we achieve more happiness through all this new and evolving technology. Are we satisfied? I suspect that technological development does not go hand in hand with satisfaction: certainly technology does not always give us the freedoms we think or hope for.

Karl Schäcke

In the medical sector there are so many possibilities and it starts with digitisation. Robin told us where this might lead to; how we can work with technology to start solving problems. It’s a long way off but we have to start somewhere.

Martin Distl

Most innovations and inventions can be used in both ways, causing benefits and harm. Technology progress, for example in the field of AI can be used to help those with permanent handicaps and diseases handle their lives and make life worth living. But I fear only a very small and privileged group of people will be able to afford these technologies to make their lives better. We have to ask ourselves if greed for profit will enable only those people to benefit from these technologies.

Angelika Hammer

In my world [as country manager of Autoscout24] mobile is already old news and we’re looking at the possibilities of speech. How does that change how we operate, how we communicate with our audiences? How does potentially not having a visual alter how we present choice to our customers? These are all things we need to think about.

Markus Dejmek

As the CEO of Institute for Entrepreneurship Cambridge – Tirol (IECT), my aim is to help promising ideas and entrepreneurs to succeed. Our universities, for instance, are full of great talents with great ideas and curious minds, but how do we tap into this resource for the benefit of them, their institutions and industry? We looked to Cambridge, which has had a long-standing and successful start-up programme for our inspiration and found three key factors: talent-spotting on university campuses; easy access to early-stage funding and an ecosystem of people for support and networking. The problem with many universities is they’d rather their talent focused on academia – producing papers and so on, rather than on tangible, real-life uses. Our role is to nurture them to access the ecosystem and the necessary business skills they most likely do not yet have.

Magdalena Hauser

I’m reminded of the inspirational Wangari Maathai, who was one of Africa’s bravest ladies, and the first to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She faced prison, served as a member of Parliament and founded the Green Belt Movement. Her lesson was to never give up and we can learn from her fight to face the future in a positive way. In her own words: ‘We cannot tire or give up. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk’.

Angelika Hammer

Hearing about the realities and possibilities of AI has made me more relaxed. Though there seems to be no answer to the question of the machines ‘taking control’ – I guess we’ll find out when it happens!

Karl Schäcke

We all know that if we smoke we are more likely to get cancer; we need to start educating people about the effects of food and nutrition. That awareness needs to be raised. Among the generations of people after World War Two, in countries such as Austria we saw the rise of meat consumption as people got money. We’re starting to see that now in countries such as China. As they’re getting richer, they are shifting their diets.

Dominik Frey

For me there’s change, especially in innovation. I work in content marketing and we are seeing the connections between content and technology, such as data driven content and data driven design. But big data alone isn’t enough, you need to make that smart data and that’s where machine learning and artificial intelligence can help a lot. Where our content comes from doesn’t really matter, but it must bring added value to the audience and the client.

Martin Distl