About

I am an entrepreneur, event designer and researcher passionate about understanding how technological innovation is reshaping society and culture. My work is about identifying and understanding upcoming shifts, spread the word via conferences and social media, and ultimately help turn changes into opportunities.

I am the founder and CEO of the Lift Conference (three days events in Europe and Asia to discuss the social implications of technologies), the co-founder and CEO of Lift Lab (a boutique consulting practice doing research projects), also a blogger, start-up adviser, and way-too-frequent-flyer attending conferences around the globe as a speaker or moderator.

After growing up in France and graduating from the university of Lausanne, I spent most of my early career developing and implementing technological solutions to solve business problems, first in a start-up, then at Arthur Andersen and Pictet. I maintain a disclosure page where you will find all the activities I am involved in.

You can contact me by emailing laurent@liftlab.com.

The more complete and written in the third person bio

Laurent was born in 1976 in Reims, Champagne. After an uneventful first 18 years he moved to Switzerland to study at the HEC school of the University of Lausanne. He quickly got hooked on the PCs of the computers center and began surfing the web with Mosaic and Netscape 1.0, using webcrawler, yahoo.stanford.edu and the other early resources.

In 1996, Laurent joined a startup company called Netface as head of Web. During his two years tenure the company won projects with high profile clients including the EPFL, Bernard Nicod (largest real estate company of the region) and Frequence Laser (formerly the biggest music retailer of Switzerland and the first large scale ecommerce site of the country). After leaving Netface, Laurent moved to Frequence Laser for one year to finish the online store, then signed with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in Geneva to work in the new technologies team.

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On stage at Lift09. Photo by Ivo Naepflin.

For more than two years he served various organizations as a consultant then senior consultant, working on a main project for the United Nations in both Geneva and New York. Laurent designed and programmed the first version of OCHA’s Financial Tracking System, a reporting system using web technologies to facilitate information exchange between the field offices and the headquarters.

After the Enron scandal dismantled Andersen, Laurent opted out of the new structure that later became Bearing Point, and, after a year of travel and independent consulting, joined the eBusiness team of Pictet, Switzerland’s largest private bank. There he worked on the bank’s technological projects, including the website, intranet and extranets.

On May 2005, Laurent decided to launch his own business and founded Lift lab, a service company whose mission is to help organizations understand and anticipate technological changes. In February 2006, Lift lab organized the first edition of the Lift conference, an event to discuss the social impact of technologies that went from 2 days and 350 participants in 2006 to 3 days and 700 participants two years later. Lift has been called “one of the highlights of the technophile calendar“ by the BBC and is consistently rated as good or excellent by more than 90% of attendees in independently run post conference surveys.

In 2008, after a successful Lift08 and a mini-event in Seoul on Sept. 2007, Lift’s first large scale Asian event  happened in Korea around the theme “beyond the web browser” and welcomed more than 400 participants. Organized in partnership with local organizations like Daum, Nabi Art Center or the Jeju KIPA, the Korean conference is the first step in Lift’s international strategy whose goal is to spot the latest and most interesting social trends around the world.

In 2009, Lift09 welcomed 800 participants to its fourth Swiss edition (themed “Where did the future go?) and expanded to France, with the first “Lift with Fing” happening in Marseille with some 560 participants from all around the world brainstorming about the “hands on future”. The Lift @ home program, created to empower the growing Lift community,  was launched in several countries, while Lift’s third Asian edition gathered 450 participants around the theme of “Serious fun”.

Laurent is a blogger (and yes, twitterer) and contributes to publications like Le Temps (articles archived here). He speaks regularly on television and radio, keynotes and moderates at conferences (Picnic, Mastermundo, ICCA congress, Leweb, First Tuesdays, AdTech, SHiFT, Inforum, etc…) and at various institutions (IMD Alumni Club, Mc Kinsey, UBS, United Nation, University of Korea, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva, etc..) on topics ranging from Web 2.0 to the impact of technologies on business and society.

Recent & upcoming presentations

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

Press coverage

The complete Lift conference press coverage (300+ articles) is archived on liftconference.com/press-coverage

Newspapers

Radio:

Videos:

Photos:

The following photos are free of right

Copyrighted pictures (please contact me before using them)