Christa

Jim Carroll delivered a keynote address and facilitated a half-day innovation strategy working session at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland on June 10, 2013, hosted by the Innovative Technology Partnerships Office. The audience included senior mission directors, leading scientists — among them members of the team building the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to Hubble — and executives responsible for Goddard’s vast portfolio of Earth science, astrophysics, and heliophysics missions. Carroll explored the rapidly shifting landscape of the space industry — the rise of commercial space, the changing economics of launch, and the implications for how NASA organized its R&D partnerships and valued its innovations — challenging his audience to think with fresh creativity about strategic collaboration in a sector being remade from the outside in. Post-event feedback from the Innovative Technology Partnerships Office described the session as “engaging and thought-provoking,” generating significant enthusiasm for new approaches to how the agency shared its innovations with the world.

Jim Carroll delivered the opening keynote address at the SURGE Accelerator in Houston, Texas in 2013, setting the stage for a high-energy day of energy startup pitches and investor engagement that Carroll described as unlike any event he had attended — complete with Bloody Marys at the morning session. SURGE was one of the first startup accelerators focused exclusively on the energy sector, bringing together entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders to explore the next generation of energy innovation. Carroll’s keynote challenged the startup community to be prepared for a landscape full of surprises that would challenge conventional wisdom about how energy is generated, distributed, and consumed — arguing that the coming decade would deliver short, sharp shocks of technological change that would create enormous opportunities for those with the innovation agility to adapt fast. The message was well-suited to an audience of founders and funders building the energy companies of the future.

Jim Carroll delivered the keynote address at the 25th anniversary customer summit of Lender Processing Services (LPS) in Orlando, Florida in April 2013, speaking to approximately 2,000 financial services executives and mortgage industry professionals in what was one of the largest keynote audiences of that year. The talk, “Surviving the Information Age,” wove together a retrospective of the 25 years of technological change since LPS was founded with a forward-looking challenge: the generational transformation now underway as Baby Boomers retired and the Gen-Connect generation — the first cohort to grow up entirely in a connected, digital world — took over both the workforce and the customer base. Carroll argued that the financial services firms that would thrive were those that understood this shift was not merely about technology adoption but about a fundamental change in attitudes toward innovation, change, and trust. A video of the full keynote was subsequently published online, becoming one of Carroll’s most-shared keynote recordings.

Jim Carroll delivered the closing keynote address at Delta Dental of Missouri’s FutureFocus 2013 conference in April 2013, speaking to an audience of HR executives, corporate benefits managers, and health plan administrators on the coming transformation of employer-sponsored health and wellness programs. The talk, “Rethinking Wellness: The Future of Healthcare,” challenged benefits professionals to look past incremental improvements to existing wellness models and engage with the structural disruption coming to healthcare delivery — from mobile health monitoring and real-time biometrics to predictive analytics tools that would allow employers and insurers to intervene long before a health crisis developed. Carroll argued that the healthcare system of 2020 would look radically different from today’s: driven by data, personalized by science, and shifted fundamentally from a sick-care model to a genuine wellness model. Delta Dental subsequently produced a highlight reel video from the session, reflecting the strong resonance the talk had with the audience.