About Laurent Haug

I am an observer, strategist, and creative matchmaker for industry leaders, start-ups, policy makers, designers, and developers; guiding them through the intricacies of emerging technologies and the larger social and economic changes that shape them.

I work with clients and projects in many different domains – entrepreneurship, finance, media, technology, retail – and facilitate the sharing of ideas, experience, and knowledge that lead to innovative action and new collaborative projects.

I am the founder of Lift, Switzerland’s first ideas conference on the subject of innovation, technology, and society.

I was twice honored as one of the most influential person in Switzerland (L’Hebdo in 2006, Bilan in 2011), won a Swiss ICT award, and was named one of the top 20 Swiss young entrepreneurs in 2011.

You can contact me by emailing hello@laurenthaug.com.

For Swiss speaking engagements, contact me directly. For international engagements, contact Tessa Sterkenburg at The Next Speaker.

The more complete and written in the third person bio

^{[Event organizers: feel free to reuse the text below. Last updated in October 2012]}
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 complete the ambitious online store project, then signed with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in Geneva to work in the new technologies team.

^{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 1100 participants five 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”.

After two more events in 2010, Lift came back to Geneva for a sixth edition (Lift11), and for the first time broke the symbolic barrier of 1000 participants, welcoming exactly 1083 persons to an edition themed “What can the future do for you”. Speakers included astronaut Claude Nicollier, entrepreneur Jean-Claude Biver, authors Brian Solis and Don Tapscott, and über-blogger Robert Scoble. In March, the first edition of Robolift (a robots themed conference co-organized with Bruno Bonnell and the European Syndicate of Robotics) was held in Lyon, followed by Lift France 11 in Marseille in July.

In June 2011 and after the birth of his first child, Laurent decided to step down from his Lift operational duties, remaining the event’s curator. Merging with an American company, Lift lab was renamed Near Future Laboratory and turned its focus to field and desk research, and Laurent decided to leave to pursue other projects, starting with a lecturer role at the university of Lausanne, teaching social media to HEC executive MBA students.

In April 2012 and after a successful Lift Asia, Laurent stepped down from Lift’s curator duties, staying involved as an advisor. He currently works multiple jobs: after joining Anthemis (an ambitious effort to reinvent finance for the information economy) as a venture partner, he started hosting a talk-show, joined a half-dozen organizations as an advisor (full list on LinkedIn), continued speaking at corporate and public events, and started to work as an innovation strategist for private clients.

Laurent is a blogger (and yes, twitterer) and regular contributor to Swiss and international media (Wired UK, L’Hebdo, RTS). 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, Mc Kinsey, UBS, United Nation, University of Korea, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva, etc..) on topics ranging from innovation strategies to the impact of technologies on business and society.

He is or has been involved in a number of business projects (innovation watch and management, social media strategies, private events organization) for clients like Lindt, Nespresso, LeShop, Clarins, Palexpo, Pictet, Leroy Merlin, Wired UK, UBS, Fondation The Ark, etc.