Jo Howorth is the Founder and Director of ActuateYou Ltd and a strategic consultant specialising in leadership, innovation and enterprise. She works with universities and mission-driven organisations to design programmes and partnerships that bring ideas to life and help people thrive.
With over twenty years’ experience in higher education, Jo combines strategic insight with a human approach, mentoring leaders and innovators, facilitating collaboration, and creating the clarity and structure needed to move complex work forward with confidence.

Dr Vicky Mountford-Brown is Assistant Professor at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. Vicky has previous experience as an enterprise and entrepreneurship academic at Newcastle University Business School. Vicky’s research interests are in the area of identities and enterprise and entrepreneurship education pedagogy and more recently, entrepreneurship and neurodiversity. Vicky is Vice President of Enterprise Educators UK.

Professor Pablo Muñoz is an applied social scientist trying to do useful research, at the intersection of human enterprise, social issues and natural environments. He is interested in the generative power of social science research and engaged scholarship; and how, combined, they can help us imagine and enact better futures. In 2023, Pablo founded the Social Science Enterprise Lab which develops unconventional methods and tools to scale up the impact of social science research through commercialisation. He also co-founded Mind Your Business, a Durham University spin-out that offers business development support as though people mattered. Outside of Durham, Pablo serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Business Venturing Insights and holds visiting research positions at IE Business School in Spain and EGADE Business School in Mexico.

Professor Ute Stephan is Professor of Entrepreneurship at King’s Business School at King’s College London. Ute is recognized as a leading expert on the psychology of entrepreneurship, as a Fellow of the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP) and a 21st Century Entrepreneurship Research Fellow. She ranks among the top 2% of scientists worldwide in Business & Management based on citations to her work (Stanford study). She researches how individuals and societies may thrive through entrepreneurship, studying well-being, stress & health and social entrepreneurship, as well as how context (culture and institutions) shape entrepreneurship.

Professor Johan Wiklund is the Al Berg Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University, USA. His research interests include neurodiversity and mental well-being in entrepreneurship. He is considered a leading authority in entrepreneurship research with over 100 articles appearing in leading entrepreneurship and management journals and over 35,000 citations to his research. He is Editor-in-Chief for Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, a premier entrepreneurship journal. A prolific advisor of Ph.D. students, he received the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division Mentor Award in 2011.

Vicky Williams is CEO at Emerald Publishing, having worked in academic publishing for over 20 years, with C-suite responsibility for a range of business areas in that time – Business Development, M&A, Marketing, Digital, and HR. Vicky has been Chief Executive for Emerald since 2018, and is proud to be part of a business that innovates, takes risks, responds to its communities, and really values its people.

As part of both giving back and learning from Emerald’s communities, Vicky is an International Advisory Board member for the University of Bradford, and an Advisory Board member for the University of Lincoln’s Impact Literacy Institute. She also work within the local community on Bradford’s Economic Recovery Board. Both in and out of work, Vicky is a keen advocate for gender diversity, having launched Emerald’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion programme in 2016, and she speaks widely on this topic at global forums and events.