Laurent Haug’s blog » About the author

About the author

I am an entrepreneur, researcher and writer based in Geneva, Switzerland, interested in the social impact of technologies and innovations. I have been working with new technologies since 1994 in a start-up , a big five consulting company , a large Swiss bank and now LIFT lab, a service company I founded and that organizes the popular LIFT conference series.

I am a regular speaker in the media, at conferences, and at various institutions. 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 Haug
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 was given large-scale projects by 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 project and then signed with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in Geneva to work in the new technologies team.

For more than two years he served various organizations as a consultant then senior consultant. Among others he worked on projects for the United Nations in both Geneva and New York, using the web to facilitate information exchange and communication at OCHA, the agency responsible for humanitarian action coordination.

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

On May 2005, Laurent founded LIFT lab, a research and consulting 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 by 90% of attendees as good or excellent.

Laurent is a regular blogger and contributor to publications like Le Temps (articles archived here), a regular speaker on national television and radio, at conferences (Leweb3, First Tuesdays, AdTech, SHiFT, Inforum, etc…) and a guest speaker at various institutions (IMD Alumni Club, Mc Kinsey, 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.