h. i summit

Shaakun Khanna is a highly sought-after Business & HR Transformation expert in Asia and serves as the Head of Human Capital Management Applications Strategy, Asia Pacific, at Oracle Corporation. He also the co-founder of Consentus Advisory and a Master Coach with the International Centre for Contemporary Consciousness.

Over the last 20 years Shaakun has been a transformation advisor to many Fortune 500 and industry leading companies. During this period Shaakun has been the CEO of Right Management, Head of IBM Smarter Workforce and the leader of Employee Engagement & Leadership Development Practice for Gallup Consulting. Shaakun has helped many organizations transform their Business Strategy, Digital Footprint, Employer Branding, Talent Management, Organization Design & Development, Employee Experience, Leadership Development and Succession Planning, etc.

Shaakun carries the rich experience of managing businesses for global organizations in various leadership roles. An Accredited executive coach, Shaakun is also a Master Facilitator of the ‘Consciousness Based Leadership’ with the International Centre for Contemporary Consciousness.

He is a published author and regularly speaks at leading Industry and Social events.

Nevena Taneva is the HR Manager of the development center of SAP in Bulgaria as of April 2017. She is responsible for the HR Business Partner function and the implementation of the SAP global strategy for people development. Nevena has more than 15 years of overall HR experience, 4 of which as Manager of the HR Business Partners Team United Bulgarian Bank and 8 as Senior Consultant at AIMS Human Capital Bulgaria. She has a Master’s degree in Psychology from Sofia University. Nevena is passionate about Diversity&Inclusion values and works actively towards promoting their importance in the Bulgarian professional environment and has been recently awarded as Ambassador of Change of Social Future Foundation.

Geoffrey West is a British theoretical physicist, former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Among his current interests is the extension of these ideas to understand quantitatively the structure and dynamics of social organizations, such as cities and corporations, including the relationships between economies of scale, growth, innovation and wealth creation and their implications for long-term survivability and sustainability.In 2006 he was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” and his work selected as one of the breakthrough ideas of 2007 by the Harvard Business Review.He is the author of several books, a visiting Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and an associate fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University.

Sumon Bhaumik received his undergraduate education at Presidency College, Calcutta, and his masters and doctoral degrees in Economics from the University of Southern California. He currently holds a Chair in Finance at the management school of the University of Sheffield. He is the Research Development Director for the finance research area of the Accounting and Financial Management division of the management school. He is also an elected member of the university’s Senate, and a member of the Senate’s Research & Innovation Committee. Outside of the university, he is a Research Fellow of IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn and a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization. He is also a member of the peer-review college of ESRC, and a member of the Editorial Review Boards of Journal of World Business and Journal of International Business Studies.

Vasil Takev is an electrical engineer with more than 20 years of progressive experience across a broad range of sales management and engineering functions, in diverse market segments, focused on the benefits that technology can bring to people. Because of the vast number of failures and mistakes done, he can combine vision, creativity, and business acumen with management and leadership qualities to reach many reasonable and some unreasonable targets. During those 20 years, his responsibilities spanned from sales management to business models generation, swirling around things like turnaround strategies, business processes improvement and demotivated people recovery. To do that, on top of my knowledge in electrification and electrical power supply, he has to learn many things about robotics and discrete manufacturing automation; industrial motion and powertrain systems; electrical vehicles charging infrastructure; digitization for predictive maintenance, and process optimization. Happily married, with two amazing kids, avid runner, skier, and SCUBA diver, engaged in a lifetime assignment for protecting nature.

Galin Stoev graduated in theater directing at VITIZ in the class of Krikor Azaryan. Since 1992 he has worked as an actor and director in Bulgaria, England, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, Belgium, Argentina, and France. Apart from being a director, Stoev also participates with roles on the stage and in the cinema. He holds awards for high creative achievements and contribution to the development of the Bulgarian-Russian cultural relations. In 2019 he was awarded the Knight of the Order of Art and Literature of France. Currently, he is the director of the National Theater of Toulouse, France.

Tim Kurth is the executive director of Aurubis Bulgaria and president of the German-Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce. He began his career at Unilever and Numico. He joined Norddeutsche Afinerie (now Aurubis) in 2006, where he was Vice President of Corporate Logistics and led the Group’s innovation group, before taking up his current position in Bulgaria in 2014. He was born in Bremen and graduated from University of Applied Sciences in Friedberg, Germany.

Dimitar started in IT in 1993 while at the Sofia University. Since then he helped grow startups, did business development across Europe, built product teams at SAP and VMware. His passion is growing people and organizations. Believes that we are people before all, everyone must be treated with respect and everyone brings something new to the team. As a Director at VMware and a site lead for Cloud Foundation in Bulgaria, he is starting new products and builds self-sustained organizations. Believes that technologies will make the world a better place and us become better people.