Design & innovation by
a preeminent artist/designer
& scientist/engineer.

Highlights

Bran Ferren speaks from unique experience on the art and science of the imagination, and how to organize for innovation.

Equal parts artist/ designer and scientist/engineer, he has a distinguished career of contribution to business and product development, film and entertainment, aerospace and other sciences, winning many awards, including three Academy Awards for technical achievement.

Ferren fills his presentations with ideas gleaned from the history of invention, his vision of design and technology’s future, and he offers concrete ways to redesign innovation processes that come from his experience as one of our finest innovation practitioners.

Bran is a dynamic and inspiring speaker with unparalleled knowledge and insight into the ways invention and innovation, creativity and technology interact for business success.

He is the co-founder, Co-Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds, a company that provides advanced technology, creative design, and consulting services to a variety of clients, including The Walt Disney Company, NASA and GM.

Before founding Applied Minds, Ferren held various leadership positions, including president, at Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's R&D division.

Bran Ferren is an energetic speaker, at once inspiring and articulate, knowledgeable and insightful.

Applied Minds

Applied Minds is a research and innovation studio that designs and develops intellectual property for a very wide range of clients and industries seeking sophisticated solutions to creative problems. As Chief Creative Officer, Bran works with clients to identify the vision for the project, assembles the project team drawing on creative minds from inside and outside the firm, and oversees the vision’s execution. Applied Minds designs everything from architecture and interior design, lighting and sound, to software, toys, vehicle systems to scientific processes and medical methods.

Innovation

Bran knows how to redesign organizations for more effective innovation. How can large organizations solve the difficulty of attracting and retaining the brightest people in innovative product design? How do you foster innovation and shorten product development cycles and not break the company? Bran Ferren comes to these questions as a seasoned practitioner with an astounding record of achievements, the most well-known perhaps being his three Academy Awards for technical achievement in film

The Story

This nationally recognized, award-winning speaker has worked in theater, film special effects, product design, architecture and the sciences. Before co-founding Applied Minds in 2000 with Danny Hillis, Ferren founded Associates & Ferren, an R&D company serving the visual and performing arts, as well as industry and the sciences. A&F became part of Walt Disney Imagineering in 1993, the resource for new technology invention and creative input for the entire company, where Ferren held several leadership positions, including president.

Ferren’s current clients include GM, Lockheed Martin, NASA, the National Security Agency and other corporations and government agencies that value his unique combination of strengths: equal measures of genius in science and technology, art and design, creative ideas and successful innovation leadership. He speaks with unique authority on

• creativity and innovation in enterprises—how to get it to happen and how to
  organize it;
• design—transforming organizations to create new products and services, new processes and effective organizational structures;
• the future—as Allan Kay has said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it; Bran can help you build a vision of what the world will be like in twenty years—and what it could be like with your help.

Credentials

• New York Drama Desk Award
• Los Angeles Critics Circle Award
• Maharam Foundation Annual Theater Design Award
• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ferren its Technical
• Achievement Award (1983), Scientific and Engineering award (1987)
• Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences