An international consultant and a Professor of Knowledge Management (KM) at Tecnológico de Monterrey (http://www.itesm.edu/wps/portal/english), he is regarded as a World leader in Knowledge Cities and Knowledge Based Development. He has an M.Sc. from UNAM, Mexico, an M.Sc. from London School of Economics and a Ph.D. in Psychology of Science and Technology from King’s Coll., London. He founded in 1992 the Center for Knowledge Systems (www.knowledgesystems.org), where he has lead over a hundred contracted projects as a director up to this date. He has developed the Capital Systems Framework as a model of knowledge-based organizations and societies. He is President of the World Capital Institute (worldcapitalinstitute.org), the organization leading the annual MAKCi Awards (Most Admired Knowledge City) as well as the Knowledge Cities World Summit. He is co-editor of the International Journal of Knowledge Based Development. He is also a founding member of the New Club of Paris and seats on the editorial boards of several international journals and KM-related professional organizations. He has built a KM network throughout the Americas (www.iberoamericana.org) and is listed in Who´s Who in The World, Who´s Who in Global Banking and Finance and in the Special Edition 2000 of The Barons 500.

Nicolas Gorjestani is a former Chief Knowledge & Learning Officer at the World Bank. An economist by training, Mr Gorjestani had held a variety of senior staff and management positions at the World Bank for more than three decades, before retiring in July 2007. A global thought leader on organizational knowledge and learning themes Mr. Gorjestani now devotes his time to advising, lecturing and writing on development strategy, knowledge-based development, organizational knowledge sharing and learning, and leadership development issues. Mr Gorjestani is currently a Senior Adviser/Consultant at the World Bank; an Adjunct Professor in Knowledge Ecology at the Polytechnic University in Hong Kong; and has been Executive Director, Secretariat, Global Indigenous Knowledge and Innovation Partnership. He was one of the pioneers of knowledge sharing, learning and innovation at the World Bank, having designed and managed several cutting edge and award winning programs and approaches to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the way to do business in development. Mr. Gorjestani was also Program Director of the World Bank’s Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program. He has also been a member of the Learning Innovation Laboratory (LILA) at Harvard University, and a member of the New Club of Paris, a think tank focused on issues of the global knowledge economy. Mr. Gorjestani has published extensively on knowledge and development topics and keynoted at major international conferences. The World Bank is five-time MAKE Award winner and six-time winner of AQPC Best Practice Partner Awards.

Dr. Jay Liebowitz is a Visiting Professor in the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University. He previously served as the Distinguished Chair of Applied Business and Finance at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. Before HU, he was the Orkand Endowed Chair of Management and Technology in the Graduate School at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). He served as a Professor in the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University. He was ranked one of the top 10 knowledge management researchers/practitioners out of 11,000 worldwide, and was ranked #2 in KM Strategy worldwide according to the January 2010 Journal of Knowledge Management. At Johns Hopkins University, he was the founding Program Director for the Graduate Certificate in Competitive Intelligence and the Capstone Director of the MS-Information and Telecommunications Systems for Business Program, where he engaged over 30 organizations in industry, government, and not-for-profits in capstone projects.
Prior to joining Hopkins, Dr. Liebowitz was the first Knowledge Management Officer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Before NASA, Dr. Liebowitz was the Robert W. Deutsch Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Professor of Management Science at George Washington University, and Chair of Artificial Intelligence at the U.S. Army War College.
Dr. Liebowitz is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Expert Systems With Applications: An International Journal (published by Elsevier). He is a Fulbright Scholar, IEEE-USA Federal Communications Commission Executive Fellow, and Computer Educator of the Year (International Association for Computer Information Systems). He has published over 45 books and a myriad of journal articles on knowledge management, analytics, financial literacy, intelligent systems, and IT management. Dr. Liebowitz served as the Editor-in-Chief of Procedia-CS (Elsevier). He is also the Series Book Editor of the new Data Analytics Applications book series (Taylor & Francis). In October 2011, the International Association for Computer Information Systems named the “Jay Liebowitz Outstanding Student Research Award” for the best student research paper at the IACIS Annual Conference. Dr. Liebowitz was the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Business at Queen’s University for the Summer 2017 and a Fulbright Specialist at Dalarna University in Sweden in May 2019. He has lectured and consulted worldwide.

JC Spender – www.jcspender.com
BA MA (Engineering) Oxford UK; PhD (Corp Strategy) Manchester Bus. Sch. UK
Served in experimental submarines before Oxford. After graduation, did reactor design and development work with Rolls-Royce & Associates on the UK nuclear submarine program. Moved to IBM as large account salesman and team leader, and then into strategy consulting.
Next to a career in investment banking – but quit commerce in 1971 to enter the Manchester PhD program. Thesis awarded the US Academy of Management AT Kearney Prize in 1980 and published as Industry Recipes (Blackwell 1989).
Served on the faculties of City University (London), York University (Toronto), UCLA, University of Glasgow, and the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Small Business at Rutgers (New Jersey).
After a year’s sabbatical with the Advanced Technology Program (US Department of Commerce) appointed Dean, School of Management, New York Institute of Technology and then Dean, School of Business and Technology, Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY), New York. Retired April 2003.
Awarded, jointly with Robert Grant, the Strategic Management Society’s 2007 Best SMJ Paper Prize for the 1996 Special Issue on Knowledge.
Currently Svenska Handelsbanken Visiting Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University (Sweden), Visiting Professor ESADE/Universitat Ramon Llull (Spain), Visiting Professor Cranfield School of Management, and Visiting Professor Open University Business School.