Sue is a futurist and also is recognised one of NZs leading Directors. One of Sue’s greatest strengths is her ability to identify the potential for opportunities and new business models associated with the exponential growth of converging digitised technology. She starts each governance and consultancy assignment with the vigor and courage required to tackle permission-less innovation, utilising her deep understanding of global trends and understanding that technology is disrupting the very foundations of business. 

Sue is recognised for her leadership in both the science/technology innovation space and her deep governance experience. As one of New Zealand’s most influential and effective board governors, Sue’s far-reaching experience spans both private and public sectors. She is a highly revered and focused professional and has an enormous ability to empower people to achieve great new heights.Her leadership in the future of work and education is widely recognised. Her governance roles have  included chairing SOEs, CRIs, Crown Entities (including establishment roles) and private sector organisations. Sue has recently finished as the Chair of both Callaghan Innovation and NZQA. She currently Chairs  Lincoln Hub (Blinc),  Jade Software, IFSO scheme  and Jacobsen Holdings Ltd. She is also on the board of Skycity and chairs their Board Sustainability Committee. Sue holds an Honoury Doctorate in Commerce from Lincoln University, an OBE for services to business, is a fellow of the Royal Society  and a Chartered Fellow of the Institute of Directors. 

Kindly sponsored by Boffa Miskell

Michael Shellenberger is a Time magazine Hero of the Environment, Green Book Award winner and the founder and president of Environmental Progress.As one of the world’s leading pro-nuclear environmentalists, Michael is considered a climate guru and high priest of the atomic humanist movement.Michael has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road.

Michael advises policy makers around the world,including in the US, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands,and Belgium. He is co-founder of Breakthrough Institute,where he was president from 2003–2015, and served as an advisor to MIT’s Future of Nuclear Energy task force.Michael was featured in Pandora’s Promise, an award winning film about environmentalists who changed their minds about nuclear, and appeared on The Colbert Report. He debated Ralph Nader on CNN’s Crossfire and Stanford University’s Mark Jacobsen at UCLA .

He is co-author of visionary books and essays including An Ecomodernist Manifesto, The Death of Environmentalism, Love Your Monsters and Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to Politics of Possibility, which was called “prescient”by Time magazine and “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring” by Wired magazine. He has been profiled in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, National Review, New Republic and NPR.Michael’s research and writing have appeared in the Harvard Law and Policy Review, Democracy Journal,Scientific American, Nature Energy, PLOS Biology and The New Republic and have been cited by the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, Washington Post, New York Daily News and The New Republic.Michael has been an environmental and social justice advocate for over 25 years. In the 1990s, he helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest and inspire Nike to improve factory conditions in Asia. In the 2000s, Michael advocated for a “new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a US$150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015.