LECTURERS
Sandra Nešić
Head of Innovation Consultancy
Sandra is passionate about helping businesses discover various ways to create and deliver value to their customers. She dedicated her career to consulting clients on how to think about new growth creators, while helping them develop a sustainable innovation capability and culture. As an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Sandra has also published a number of articles in academic journals on innovation management and entrepreneurship.
Afonso Rebelo de Sousa
Corporate Venture Builder & BD Advisor
Afonso is owner of innovation consultancy Saint Brand focused on building corporate ventures. His career spans 17+ years of marketing, design, tech consulting in corporate entities such as WPP, Adidas and LinkedIn before becoming a full time entrepreneur just 3 years ago. In 2019, Afonso built and led cybersecurity corporate venture Telenet Safespot from inception to launch and is presently engaged in building ventures for EDF Luminus still to launch in 2020. Highly communicative, trained agile coach and speaker, Afonso has worked in 8, and is now living in his 9th country.
Vladimir Vulić
Digital Transformation Strategist
Vladimir is a digital transformation strategist., co-founder of Digitalizuj.Me and the Program Director of Spark.me conference. He teaches the course ‘Transforming Business in the Digital Era’ at the COTRUGLI Business School (E)MBA program and has been recognised as ‘Project Manager of the Year’ by the Association of Montenegrin Managers. With 12 years of experience teaching Strategic Management at the University of Montenegro, he has been a keynote speaker in 20 countries across 4 continents, from Peru to Taiwan and also a three-time TEDx speaker.
Kosta Andrić
Executive Director
As the Executive Director of ICT Hub, Kosta prides himself in building and leading a team that is successfully bringing together the startup and corporate community in Serbia, forging a strong innovation ecosystem that is embracing different methodologies, mindsets and business cultures. People who know him say that his forte is recognizing the right time for connecting the right people, enabling them to exchange knowledge, ideas and resources in just the right way.
Đorđe Đorđević
Business Designer
Đorđe is working with ICT Hub's corporate partners on the unique and out-of-the-box products, programs and projects that are at the forefront of innovation and in the midst of corporate-startup collaboration, often with a product owner approach. As someone who is running ICT Hub’s IoT laboratory - Garage Lab, he is closely following the latest trends in connectivity, robotics, mobility, IoT, 3D printing and 5G, assisting his team with anything from research on these topics, all the way to setting up new devices and testing them.
Đurđa Đukić
Business Designer
Đurđa contributes to the development and strengthening of innovation capacities, practices and culture in companies and makes sure to coordinate and deliver projects that aim to design new services and products, injecting innovation into every part of a business organization. She is an experienced design thinker, having run numerous workshops, bootcamps and open innovation challenges and has racked up more than 200 hours as a certified trainer and facilitator, organizing and conducting various trainings.
Jelena Šaranović
Education & Training Manager
Jelena's key skill is having a knack for idea challenges and her inner nerdiness makes her a perfect sidekick for any project that aims to inspire, educate or provide practical training to corporate employees. She is a firm believer in testing business ideas and an advocate for adopting the startup mindset in doing business.
Luka Prišunjak
Ecosystem Facilitator & Business Designer
Luka focuses on customer development, i.e. the way by which you get to your first clients and users by validating your business ideas, which as an approach is widely accepted both in small startup teams and big corporate systems. After moving from the construction industry to the world of startups, he focused on helping companies open up to new markets and find new customers.
Aleksandar Markuš
Scrum Master
Aleksandar's career took off in the field of sports marketing and organizing sports events, where he had the opportunity to focus on client communication and team management. His first contact with Agile happened at Bosch, where he was a part of a SoftTec department tasked with developing software for future mobility solutions. Now a Scrum Master at Growit, he is working on introducing agile into companies from banking, pharma and FMCG industries, both locally and globally.
PAST LECTURERS
Heinrich Schmid-Schmidsfelden
VP Company Building
Heinrich heads the company building initiatives at WhatAVenture, a full-service innovation consultancy with offices in four countries around the globe, headquartered in Vienna. Before that, he led the corporate innovation team at a multinational technology company. In this capacity, he ran intrapreneurship programs, created an international startup acceleration program and was involved in a number of startup investments and strategic innovation projects.
Daniel Schwarzbach
Director Technology & Innovation
Dr Daniel Schwarzbach is a highly-skilled corporate innovator who designs processes and leads teams to develop cutting edge technologies and products. After 15+ years experience in senior management functions in various globally acting tech companies, Daniel has changed his perspective and strengthens WhatAVenture's consulting team, working with corporate customers on technology and product innovation topics.
Tatjana Jovanović
Director HR for SEE
Tatjana is a psychologist with extensive experience in contemporary HR practices gained through numerous roles in an international environment. She is leading the change of organizational culture and implementation of new working models based on start-up way of thinking in order to support the company in further utilizing full potential of its employees.
Milica Jović
Chief Human Resources Officer
As CHRO of Nelt Group, Milica manages all aspects of human capital management for more than 3,000 people across multiple markets in the Balkans and Africa. Her personal goal is integrating analytics into traditional HR and growing HR into an important decision maker and strategic partner to the business. Milica is a graduate of Yale University and prior to joining Nelt in 2017, she was a management consultant at McKinsey, working on engagements in pharmaceutical industry across Western Europe and the United States.
Novica Ninić
Integration & Development Sales Leader
Novica is a senior professional in IT Industry and has been working with clients on the digitalisation of their businesses for almost 15 years. As an Electrical Engineering graduate, Novica started a career in Telco and IT system integration, first as a junior engineer and advancing to the role of a CTO. With significant experience in complex IT projects, including consulting and executive roles, he moved to an IT multinational corporation and is now helping clients from all over the region get the most out of digital transformation.
Jasmina Nikolić
Agile Organizational Developer
Jasmina is the co-founder of Agile Humans, university lecturer, trainer and coach. As member of both Agile and Scrum Alliance, Jasmina is a specialist in the field of agile organizational culture, education and business and development integration. With a proven record in agile software development, she is a certified Scrum Professional, Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master and NLP Practitioner, but also a Kanban Method Coach and Experienced Group Facilitator. She has worked in a number of industries, contexts and companies, both in public and private sectors.
Ivan Filipović
Head of Product Development
As the Head of Product Development at 30Hills, Ivan is in charge of digitalising the processes for large companies and innovative startups. With over 10 years of experience on IT projects in the fields of finances, military industry, time management and logistics, Ivan is helping companies define, develop and implement digital solutions adapted to a specific business process. He is a PhD candidate at the IT department of the Faculty of Organisational Sciences, with a focus on decision support systems and machine learning.
Alina Gratschner
Founder & CEO
Alina has lived and worked in Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia, being actively engaged in connecting and developing innovative ecosystems across continents. Alina is the Founder of Xmind/io, and the Co-founder of Accelerate Korea, focusing on acceleration, innovation and venture building programs in partnership with public and private sectors. Being passionate about emerging technologies shaping our future and driving economic development, she contributes as an advisor, guest lecturer and mentor to various organizations.
Kristina Petrova
Strategy Director
Kristina is the Strategy Director at Launchlabs, which is an innovation studio with offices in Berlin, Basel, Bangalore & Sofia. Her team works together with companies to redesign mindsets, experiences and spaces. Through the lens of strategy, she is always looking to uncover creative solutions that spark innovation. She has worked on international and regional brands at Saatchi & Saatchi and since 2014, she has held lectures for master students at ARC Academy - a learning platform for future creators.
Faris Začina
Co-founder & CEO
Faris is one of the founders and CEO of Ministry of Programming which has in the past four years become the fastest growing IT company in Bosnia and Herzegovina and one of the top 50 fastest growing tech companies in Central Europe, collaborating with some of the best entrepreneurs in Europe. They are currently working on 22 global startups that bring significant innovation to different industries. Faris has previously worked as a designer, a programmer and a manager, but has always been interested in the methodology of building startups.
Dušan Vukanović
Innovation and Business Development Manager
Dušan is an innovation consultant, entrepreneur and lecturer. With more than 15 years of experience in implementing various consulting projects iin areas of HR management, organisational development, strategic communications and innovation, at ICT Hub he has been in charge of designing and delivering programs that support large Serbian corporations on their innovation journeys since 2015. Dušan had previously worked for the American National Democratic Institute and is also the founder of the Managing Board of Serbian Association of Management Consultants.
Hristo Stankushev
Architect and CEO
Hristo is an experienced architect, born and working in Sofia. He is the founder and CEO of 7561 architects, co-founder of architecture and design studio dontDIY and co-founder at furniture brand Almost. In his years of practice, Hristo has won several awards, while his projects have been published across the globe in media such as Wallpaper*, Frame, dezeen, A10 and Bravacasa. His main focus remains striving to deliver a bespoke product through shared knowledge.
Sonja Kresojević
Co-founder & Author
Sonja is the co-founder of Spinnaker Consulting, a speaker on topics of transformation, business agility, leadership, innovation strategy and the co-author of 'Lean Product Lifecycle', with over 20 years of experience transforming businesses by focusing on product innovation, cultural change and digital transformation.
Nemanja Čedomirović
Co-founder & Agile practitioner
As the co-founder of GrowIT, Nemanja Čedomirović is passionate about solving the challenges associated with Agile in complex environments. He managed a numerous team transition to Agile way of working. He spends most of his time leading and nurturing Growit, doing sales and business development, and also providing strategic coaching for clients. He is one of the organizers of the biggest PHP conference in the Balkans. Also he enjoys establishing communities, some of which you may know: Agile coaching Serbia, eCommerce association of Serbia and PHP Serbia.