Agenda

Headliner:

J. Cris Salinas, MD
Head of Industry Strategy, Healthcare and Life Sciences
Adobe

Why You Should Listen to Dr. Salinas:
Dr. Salinas is an innovator at the crossroads of medicine and technology, advancing the future of healthcare through strategic leadership and digital transformation. With 20+ years of global experience, including roles at Salesforce, Stryker, Pfizer, and Best Buy Health, he has helped organizations rethink commercial models and improve patient outcomes. Now serving as Adobe’s Head of Industry Strategy for Healthcare and Life Sciences, he partners with leading organizations to design impactful, tech-driven solutions. A frequent speaker and thought leader, he continues to shape the conversation on the future of health.

Explore strategic approaches to accelerate technology adoption and advancements through building, buying, or partnering. This session provides actionable insights for executives to evaluate options, optimize investments, and align technology decisions with business priorities, capabilities, and budget.

Action Items:

• Evaluate your current technology roadmap against business priorities to identify gaps
• Develop a structured blueprint for making build vs. buy vs. partner scenarios and finding the right partners
• Cultivate partnerships that complement internal capabilities and accelerate delivery

Rockstar Insight:

Lutz Beck
Chief Information Officer
Daimler Truck North America

Why You Should Listen to Lutz
Lutz is shaping the future of IT at Daimler Truck North America. By directing cultural change through digital activation, his visionary IT strategy, “Building the Intelligent Company,” guides digital transformation at DTNA, positioning the organization at the cutting edge of technology. Lutz champions IT Leadership, disruptive ideas and innovation by re-imagining the way business is done.

Hosted By:

Omid Toloui
Faculty
UCLA Anderson School of Management

Why You Should Listen to Omid:
Bio is forthcoming.

Innovation teams are under increasing pressure to justify investment, yet most dashboards track activity rather than value. Leaders don’t need to know how busy you are — they need to know whether innovation will materially contribute to future growth. Unfortunately, “vanity metrics” like number of ideas, challenges launched, or startup partnerships rarely answer that question. This session reframes innovation measurement around value, risk, and learning. To understand whether you’re on track to meet value-creation goals over the next 1, 5, or 10 years, you need a practical way to assess early-stage opportunities when information is sparse and uncertainty is unavoidable.

Action Items:

• Surface the root causes behind ineffective innovation metrics — and why they persist
• Learn a structured approach for quantifying early-stage opportunities that embraces uncertainty instead of oversimplifying it
• Redesign your dashboard to communicate a credible, portfolio-level view of future value creation

Rockstar Insights:

David Matheson
President and Chief Executive Officer
SmartOrg

Why You Should Listen to David:
With over two decades of portfolio and innovation management experience, David is a leader in helping executives achieve better growth results. He holds a Ph.D. in organizational decision making from Stanford University, is a Fellow with the Society of Decision Professionals (SDP), and always has chocolate within arm’s reach (especially at workshops).

Doug Williams
Associate Director, Innovation
SmartOrg

Why You Should Listen to Doug:
An industry veteran with nearly 15 years of experience in the field, Doug leads the innovation practice at SmartOrg. He has helped over 80 organizations build and grow innovation programs through his work at Planview Spigit and a leading research organization.

Abstract:

Selecting the right partners is critical for corporate innovators and startups seeking to scale effectively and meet unique business needs. In this session, we’ll examine real-world case histories from Mastercard’s award-winning Start Path program, revealing how startups and corporates can accelerate growth through strategic alignment. Learn how corporates identify partners that fit their strategy while incorporating startups’ capabilities to jointly accelerate growth, co-innovate, gain both subject and technical expertise, as well as market access. Whether you’re a startup innovating, a corporate thinking about how best to work with growth companies, or you’re an investor seeking alternative paths for your portfolio companies to scale, this discussion will provide practical guidance on forging partnerships that deliver measurable impact.

Action Items:

• Evaluate partnership fit based on strategic goals and resources
• Design and leverage corporate accelerator programs to access enterprise customers and global distribution
• Build credibility and securing potential investment

Rockstar Insight:

Daniel Rich
Vice President, Startup & Venture Partnerships, Security Solutions,
Mastercard

Why You Should Listen to Daniel:
Dan has over 25 years of experience in product management, innovation management, and corporate strategy, holding senior roles at Oracle, FICO, and now Mastercard. In his current role, Dan oversees Mastercard’s award-winning startup engagement program, Start Path, driving partnerships and investments with growth-oriented tech companies. Dan is an advisor for several companies and serves as a Fellow for Mastercard’s Policy Center for the Digital Economy.

Moderator:

Greg Horowitt
Director of Innovation
UC San Diego

Why You Should Listen to Greg:
Bio is forthcoming.

Panelists Include:

Joe Epstein
Strategic Partnerships Lead
Lockheed Martin Space

Why You Should Listen to Joe:
Joe has three decades of experience in the Aerospace and Defense field executing projects and roles from the research side to the larger business and strategy. This research and development role has given technical depth Joe’s current responsibility as Space Strategic Partnerships Lead for Space in the Ignite organization. Responsibilities include owning SBIR/STTR portfolio, as well as working OTA and CRAD opportunities along with University Sponsored research. These activities are to identify, and champion emerging technology from sources outside of Lockheed Martin ecosystem for our Space business platforms supporting our DoD and NASA customer programs..

Sam Heshmati
Executive Managing Director – Head of Emerging VC and Innovation Banking
Citizens Private Bank

Why You Should Listen to Sam:
Sam has over 23 years of experience in the technology ecosystem, serving clients not only as a banker, but as someone who can guide clients as they make important decisions within this space. Over his career, he has worked with more than 1000 early-stage VC firms and several thousand venture-backed startups. Prior to joining First Republic in 2012, he spent 10 years as a tech banker at Silicon Valley Bank and Square 1 Bank.

Lesley Stolz
Head West North America External Scientific Innovation
Johnson & Johnson

Why You Should Listen to Lesley:
Lesley has spent the last 30 years working in corporate development and partnering in life sciences. She spent more than 20 years working for innovator companies partnering with multinationals, and she is now working for a multinational partnering with innovators. The only way that new solutions for health will get to families is through these partnerships.

Rockstar Insight:

Miguel Olarte
Senior Breakthrough Innovation Lead – Global
Diageo

Why You Should Listen to Miguel:
Bio is forthcoming.

In the era of AI, partnership models must evolve into repeatable, scalable systems that adapt as quickly as technology shifts. In this session, Elaine shares the human-centered, AI-informed partnership approach and scalable frameworks she has developed throughout her career to help organizations build adaptive structures that accelerate innovation and sustained value.

Action Items:

• Identify high-value partners using AI-informed capability mapping, strategic alignment validation, risk evaluation, and assessment of their fit for human-centered innovation
• Build scalable partnership structures—governance, operating cadences, and KPIs—grounded in a modern human-centered AI partnership approach
• Integrate AI-enabled experimentation loops to validate value quickly, eliminate friction, and accelerate co-innovation at scale

Rockstar Insight:

Elaine Barsoom
Former Global Head, Tech Innovation Partnerships & Strategy
Nike

Why You Should Listen to Elaine:
Elaine helps companies turn frontier technologies into durable engines of growth. With more than two decades leading innovation at Nike, American Express, and Airbnb, she builds scalable frameworks that translate emerging tech into real enterprise value. Today, she advises Fortune 1000 leaders, VC-backed founders, and private equity firms on anticipating market shifts, mobilizing ecosystems, and enabling responsible, enterprise-scale AI adoption that accelerates competitive advantage.