Agile 50: The World's 50 Most Influential People Revolutionising Government

Paola Pisano is an Italian academic and politician currently serving as Minister of Technological Innovation and Digitalisation in the Conte II Cabinet of Italy. In her position, she has brought agility to the national limelight with the introduction of Italy's new 'Diritto ad Innovare' (right to innovate) - a way for innovators to work with the government to test their ideas and help adapt the country's laws for the future. She also unveiled the Digital Republic Manifesto with the objective to relaunch digital identity and domicile, revamp traditional manufacturing, and achieve inclusive and sustainable development. Previously, she held the position of Deputy Mayor of Turin and created Torino City Lab, a platform for companies to test innovative ideas in the real world - from novel urban services enabled by 5G technologies to autonomous vehicles and drones.

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Dorothee Bär is the State Minister for Digital Affairs in Germany. During her term, she pioneered the German approach to experimentation with technology - "Reallabore" - or 'real world labs'. Based on enabling experimentation across levels of governments, society and sectors, the strategy has fuelled the development of experiments in different German states to unlock technologies from floating water drones to telemedicine. She led the launch of an innovation-driven competition which produced over 90 regulatory experiments revolving around improving the oncoming energy transition.

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David Moinina Sengeh is the Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education and Chief Innovation Officer for the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation in Sierra Leone. His expertise lies in the junction of education and technology. Over the last year, he launched the government’s flagship Free Quality School Education (FQSE) programme, from which 2.6 million children and young people (approximately 37% of Sierra Leone’s population) directly benefit. As Sierra Leone's first Chief Innovation Officer, he created the country's first National Innovation and Digital Strategy, laying the path for the first time toward a vision of digitization for all. In addition, he introduced the first Education Data Hub in the country, which collates accurate data, state-of-the-art analytics and near real-time decision support tools for research, informed policy, planning and evaluation of interventions across schools.

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Tan Kiat How is currently the Minister of State at the Prime Minister's Office in Singapore. As the former CEO of the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), a statutory board in Singapore, he set the tone for the agency's pioneering, innovation-enabling approach to governance of digital technologies. He led the IMDA's Data Collaboratives Programme, which has attracted data innovators from across the globe to set up shop in Singapore, while its Model AI Governance Framework has shaped the global debate on how artificial intelligence should be used.

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Abdulla bin Touq is the Minister of Economy of the United Arab Emirates. He is the former Secretary General of the UAE Cabinet, during which time he was key in strengthening synergies between federal and local governments. He has spearheaded many initiatives to gauge the pulse of the people and their sentiments. One of them is the RegLab, which aims to turn the ‘black-box’ of legislative design into a ‘transparent-box’ by creating a space for policymakers to share experiences with each other and open up to learning from mistakes and iterations in real-time.

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Mai Tien Dung is Minister and Chairman of the Office of the Government (OOG) and chairs the National Advisory Council for Administrative Reforms. In his role, he coordinates with other ministries and provinces to monitor through KPIs and supervise the implementation of decisions made by the Prime Minister and the Government at cabinet sessions. Notably, he has undertaken the reduction of unnecessary, overly cumbersome licensing and 'red tape' processes, as well as championing improvements to Vietnam's regulatory and foreign investment climate. He was also responsible for creating the e-Cabinet and the National Reporting Platform of Vietnam, making government more transparent to the population. Based on World Bank data, this e-Cabinet and reporting reform saves Vietnam US$640 million per year.

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Tim De Sousa is a legal and policy specialist with a focus on emerging tech, privacy and information governance. De Sousa established and ran the NSW Government Policy Lab in 2019, Australia's first whole-of-government human-centred policy design lab. He is currently the Executive Manager for Privacy at Westpac Bank and has held senior roles with NSW Department of Customer Service, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s industry-leading Digital Trust and Privacy team, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).

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Hirohiko Nakahara is the Deputy Director-General for Economic and Social Policy at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan. In his role, he has established the Japanese regulatory sandbox system, which, unlike systems in other jurisdictions, provide regulatory flexibility in a single area of technology such as fintech. He designed the system to enable innovation across all of Japan's ministries and agencies with a single point of contact in the Cabinet Office to make it easier for businesses to engage with government.

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Hiroki Habuka is Deputy Director of the Digital Economy Division, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan (METI). He is an attorney at law admitted in Japan and New York State. Habuka is in charge of establishing a new regulatory framework for rapidly changing digital technologies, including AI governance, privacy protection, data security as well as issues related to digital platforms in Japan and abroad. He was a key player in the preparation of METI's Governance Innovation report last year. With his background, he has been instrumental in facilitating discussion among professionals and academics to identify the challenges of the traditional legal approaches to the 'new reality' under mass digitalisation. He also spearheads an initiative to launch a new curriculum at the University of Tokyo featuring Governance Innovation.

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Anna Wallace is the former Head of Innovate at the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and introduced the world's first regulatory sandbox - a safe space for trialling novel innovations under regulatory supervision - that has been emulated by over 30 countries worldwide. In her role, she also established advice services targeted at innovators to help them understand the regulatory system and gather vital intel about how it might need to adapt in future. She was key in the establishment of the Global Financial Innovation Network, cementing global regulatory collaboration to enable innovation in financial services. Currently, she leads regulatory technology projects for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Iain Forbes is the Head of the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, a cross-departmental government team that spans the UK's business and transport ministries. He led the creation of the Centre and notably, pioneered an outcome-focused regulatory approach to self-driving cars supported by a code of practice which can be updated as technology evolves, saving the need for repeated changes to the law. This regulatory approach has been emulated by other countries and supports the testing of vehicles in the real world, under safe conditions. In addition, he has driven legislative change to create the world's first insurance market for self-driving cars.

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Julie Inman Grant is Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. In this role, Grant leads the world’s first government agency committed to keeping its citizens safe online. Her role started in 2015 as the Children’s eSafety Commissioner, quickly expanding to online safety regulation generally. The office has pioneered how governments regulate and respond to cases of serious cyberbullying; child exploitation and abuse; image abuse; and abhorrent violent material. Grant was designated one of Australia’s most influential women by the Australian Financial Review in 2019.

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Aidan Eyakuze is Executive Director of Twaweza East Africa, which enables children to learn, citizens to exercise agency and governments to be more open and responsive in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. In this role, he has created a mobile phone panel survey platform — Sauti za Wananchi, or Voices of the People — which enables public participation in policymaking in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. The platform involves a representative panel of 2,000 citizens in each country who provide feedback on their experience and assess the quality of public services. Eyakuze is deeply committed to open governance and serves as a Board Member at the Open Government Partnership.

Mariya Gabriel is the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth. Among other programmes, she leads Horizon Europe, the EU’s next funding programme for research and innovation set to run from 2021 to 2027 with a proposed budget of €100 billion. This initiative aims not only to boost Europe's research and innovation capacity, competitiveness and job market, but has horizontal priorities to deliver on citizens' priorities. Her role in ensuring investment flows for disruptive research and breakthrough innovations and full implementation of the programme has been, and continues to be, crucial.

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Mikk Vainik is the head of Accelerate Estonia – an agile innovation project initiated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Estonia – and a startup policy expert at the Ministry. In early March, he successfully led 'Hack the Crisis', a radical crowdsourcing initiative to develop solutions to the Covid-19 pandemic that delivered results in merely 24 hours. His team carried it out on the same day that the pandemic was declared an emergency, securing ministerial sign-off at 10 a.m., selecting partners and launching the hack-a-thon at 4:30 p.m. and within just 90 minutes, securing over 80 ideas for consideration from 650 people. Solutions that came out of the hackathon included a Covid data map, crises chatbots and a website for recruiting medical volunteers in low-capacity hospitals, among several others. His team's work enabled Estonia to react promptly to the pandemic.

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Wendy Flores previously worked in institutions such as the National Bank of Costa Rica, in the Project department, where she was part of strategic projects like the Digital File. Later, she joined the Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications, as a professional in the Department of Public Telecommunications Policies, a team that leads the formulation of national public policy for the Telecommunications Sector. She is currently the director in charge of the deployment and monitoring of Regulatory Improvement and Simplification of procedures, as indicated in the Law 8220 and its Regulations. In this position, Flores is articulating a strategy with key actors to impact the competitiveness of the country, also creating innovative capacities in the country’s public institutions for the use and appropriation of the tools of the Regulatory Improvement ecosystem.

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Surina Shukri is CEO of Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and has led one of the fastest Covid-19 responses by any country through the #DigitalvsCovid initiative. On March 18, the Malaysian government had promptly imposed a Movement Control Order (MCO) in the country to restrict the spread of Covid-19, massively impacting people and their work. The #DigitalvsCovid initiative by MDEC had brought together over 80 local tech companies in Malaysia to render digital solutions and proactively support businesses and consumers that the MCO had adversely affected.

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Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D. is the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the Food and Drug Administration. The center is responsible for assuring the safety and effectiveness of biological products, including vaccines, allergenic products, blood and blood products, and cellular, tissue, and gene therapies. He and his team are tasked with ensuring that the Covid-19 vaccine that is ultimately produced is both safe and effective, and that it has gone through a rigorous evidence-based and transparent process. He has also been key in pushing for emergency authorisation and speedy reviewal of the vaccine.

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Rodney Ghali is Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet of the Impact and Innovation Unit at the Privy Council Office, Canada. He introduced the Impact Canada initiative, which sets public challenges to help develop innovative solutions to economic, environmental, and social problems. Under Ghali's leadership, the Government of Canada has committed to devote a fixed innovation fund for testing out new approaches to resolving pressing issues and measuring their impact. His team provides guidance to public officials on how to integrate experimentation into their jobs - and learning and adapting according to the outcomes.

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Emma Tunley is a Policy Manager at the UK Solicitors Regulation Authority where she leads reforms for modernisation and liberalisation of the legal service market. She is responsible for SRA Innovate, a programme to help legal service providers develop their businesses to support new types of tech and alternative organisations who may need legal services for the first time. She also collaborated with Nesta to lead the Legal Access Challenge, a project aimed at accelerating AI-driven solutions to help people access justice and inform an adaptive regulatory approach to adoption of LawTech in the market. She now works to help women and children suffering from domestic violence to gain court orders, access legal aid and navigate court processes.

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Janneke Timmerman is Programme manager of the Action programme 'New opportunities for Top Sector LSH' at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate in the Netherlands. She led the creation of the Green Deals in the Netherlands - a mutual agreement under private law between companies, civil society organizations and local and regional government to remove barriers for sustainable initiatives. In the period between 2011 and 2014, 176 Green Deals were closed in the Netherlands, involving a total of 1,090 participants. The Green Deals cover 9 themes: energy, the bio-based economy, mobility, water, food, biodiversity, resources, construction and the climate.

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Soo-min Lee is Deputy Director for Urban Economy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in South Korea. She has led the South Korean government to create the first local regulatory sandboxes in both Busan and Sejong. These regulatory sandboxes, approved in September 2018, lift regulations related to Smart City development in areas such as data collection, autonomous vehicles, drones and land use in consultation with local residents. When pilot projects rolled out under these sandboxes are successful, regulations are revised to spur the development of Smart City projects in other regional and municipal governments.

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Andrew Mutabaruka is the Head of Aviation Safety at Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and was integral in the development of the Part 27 drone rule specifying the airworthiness standards for normal category rotorcraft (such as helicopters). The regulation commits to ensuring that risk is minimised, while making sure that innovation is encouraged. The CAA has involved industry and stakeholders by developing steering committees to ensure “cooperative rule-making” and public acceptance.

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Paula Leitão is the Deputy Head of the Financial System Regulation Department of the Brazilian Central Bank. She recently worked on an initiative to implement a new regulatory sandbox in Brazil which is part of a series of actions by the Central Bank in favor of modernization and competitiveness in the country’s financial and payment systems. This regulatory sandbox is the first of its kind in Latin America.

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Subash Khuntia is the Chairman of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India and former Chief Secretary of the state of Karnataka. Over the last year, he has employed sandbox policies allowing insurers to experiment with products not covered in existing frameworks for a limited tenure. He also enabled partnerships with insurance companies to design policies that could cover treatment for Covid-19. The agile nature of this response manifested as the first insurance cover for Covid-19 which was launched in early March, during the virus’s nascent stages in India. The cover includes a 100% payout for positive cases and a 50% payout for those quarantining in a government or army hospital – even if one later tests negative. His work has set the pace for wider experimental approaches towards Covid-19 treatment across the government.

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Tim Johnson is Policy Director at the UK's Civil Aviation Authority. He established a pathfinder programme to find ways to bring new aerial technologies to the market, which includes partnering with Amazon to trial drone delivery services. Johnson also created a new advisory service to innovators which offers regulatory guidance innovators sale of their products; a new regulatory ‘sandbox’ to allow testing; and a regulatory lab that convenes relevant bodies to identify future legislative and regulatory barriers to innovations like flying taxis. At the heart of Johnson's work lies public engagement. He teamed up with Nesta to create the Flying High Drones Programme to work with local stakeholders to understand their perspectives on regulation of aerial technologies.

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Amitabh Kant is presently CEO of National Institution for Transforming India (NITI), and works closely with businesses, international governments and wider stakeholders to develop a progressive framework in areas such as artificial intelligence and the future of mobility, as well as developing a favourable start-up ecosystem more generally. He is also Secretary of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, working to create a framework for agile governance to promote technology and business in India. Kant has been a key driver of the “Make in India”, "Startup India", “Incredible India” and "God’s Own Country” initiatives that positioned India and the state of Kerala as leading manufacturing and tourism destinations. These campaigns have won several international awards and embraced a host of activities – infrastructure development, product enhancement, private-public partnership and positioning and branding based on extensive market research.

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Harry Armstrong is Director of Regulatory Policy at Ofwat, the UK water industry regulator, where he is developing a GBP200 million fund to invest in new technologies to enable more sustainable, efficient and resilient delivery of water services. Armstrong was formerly Head of Technology Futures at Nesta, shaping global thinking on the need for change in governance in the Fourth Industrial Revolution with his groundbreaking paper on 'Renewing Regulation'. He has helped design initiatives across North America, Europe and Asia - including several featured in this list.

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Iva Aminuddin is Head of the Learning Future Group in the Civil Service College of Singapore. In her 7 years of service at the Civil Service College, her most notable work was in leading the College's Applied Simulation and Training (CAST) Lab, which was established as an interdepartmental working group that looks at developing serious experimentative games and applied simulations to enhance learning and increase engagement in CSC programmes. Prior to that, she served at the Public Service Division of the Prime Minister's office as Assistant Director, Change Capacity and Innovation working on embedding people-focused change and OD capabilities within public sector organizations.

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Jon Simonsson is Chair of the Committee for Technological Innovation and Ethics, Swedish Government. He established the Committee for Technological Innovation and Ethics to scope how governance in Sweden needs to change for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. His aim is to make government faster at dealing with the ethical, legal and regulatory challenges triggered by artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and other technologies. He spearheaded reviews on topics from governance of health data through to quantum computing - with the Committee's major report due to issue later this year.

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Olli-Pekka Rantala is the Director-General of the Services Department at the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Finland. He has led the Ministry to fundamentally reimagine how transport regulation should work in a world with new forms of mobility – stripping it right back to become technology-neutral and focus on the outcomes that citizens want. He successfully led the establishment of the One Sea Ecosystem in collaboration with the shipping industry to create the world’s first testing area for autonomous ships.

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Sara Gry Striegler is head of the Danish Design Centre’s business and focus area and the team Future Welfare. Future Welfare explores how design can radically transform public services, offer solutions across public and private sectors, and is centered around improving citizen experience. Their goal is to facilitate creation of new services and products and public-private innovation frameworks through experimentation. In the city space, she leads a major challenge competition for the philanthropic association Realdania to design new business models that reduce waste in the built environment. At the international level, she has facilitated collaboration with the UNDP to build a design-led toolkit for transitioning towards platform governance – a new way of working to achieve the global SDGs. The Centre also houses a Design Academy that trains leaders and innovators in design methodology for service innovation, business development, and policy making.

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Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen is a Tech Ambassador at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Denmark. She joined the Danish Government as the youngest ambassador in Danish history and is spearheading the Techplomacy initiative, working closely with partners both abroad and in Denmark to promote a responsible, balanced and human-centered approach to technology. Prior to that, Larson led the World Economic Forum's work on Fourth Industrial Revolution and Global Public Goods with the aim of mobilizing technology companies, governments, international organisations, investors and civil society to collaboratively tackle the barriers preventing emerging technology from scaling responsibly to help solve society’s biggest challenges. She is credited with creating a podcast series "Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution" to make the topic of agile governance more accessible.

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Jeannine Ritchot is a senior public sector leader in Canada. As former Executive Director for Regulatory Affairs, Ritchot introduced wide-ranging initiatives to reform Canada's regulatory system for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These include targeted regulatory reviews which address barriers to innovation in agri-food, biosciences, transportation, clean technology and digitisation, and establishment of the Centre for Regulatory Innovation and the External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness in Canada. Through her work, she has shaped global perspectives on the need for international regulatory co-operation and brokered regulatory co-operation initiatives with the USA and EU. She is currently the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Communications and Portfolio Sector at Natural Resources Canada, effectively bringing innovation and global co-operation in environmental governance.

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Joe Teria is the Deputy Governor of Bank Papua New Guinea. He created the world's first cross-border sandbox for testing new technologies with counterparts in the Banco Central de Timor-Leste, Central Bank of Samoa, Central Bank of Solomon Islands, National Reserve Bank of Tonga, Reserve Bank of Fiji and Reserve Bank of Vanuatu, as well as the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. This initiative has been lauded as a feat that no other governments have achieved in the fintech or other sectors.

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Ziad Al Yousef is Deputy Governor For Development and Technology at the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA). Al Yousef initiated the G20 TechSprint this year to stimulate new innovative technologies to resolve operational problems in financial regulatory compliance and supervision. The outputs from the TechSprint are set to tackle risks such as money laundering and enable dynamic market monitoring/intervention in the wake of Covid-19. He was formerly the Managing Director of Saudi Payments, responsible for developing the national payments strategy and a roadmap to guide modernization of Saudi Arabian payment systems.

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Vincent Loy is the Assistant Managing Director at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), responsible for technology, data, digital, cybersecurity and technology regulations. Under his leadership, the Monetary Authority of Singapore has created more fintech bridges – co-operation agreements with other governments which are designed to enable innovation to cross borders freely – than any other country in the world. He also established the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network to promote innovation in the region. Loy was formerly Financial Services Leader for Accenture, Singapore and advised global organisation & governments on strategising & managing innovation, disruption and digitalisation.

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Amna Faridoon is Chief Audit Executive at UAE Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR). In her role, Faridoon has experimented with continuous auditing and monitoring techniques, harnessing technology to scan data and to present digital user-friendly reports on internal controls. She has also initiated international collaboration with nuclear regulators to identify, share and implement state-of-the-art practices to conduct technical audits in the field of nuclear and radiation.

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Keisuke Murakami is the Director General of Local Revitalization Promotion in the Cabinet Office of Japan. He led the introduction of the Super City Bill in May 2020, which enables each region in Japan to establish its own special regulatory exceptions with the consent of residents, with the government providing the necessary infrastructure support. Application Programming Interface (API) principles were included in the bill to ensure the smooth use of common infrastructure across different operators and to ensure interoperability and collaboration of data and services. His approach involves open collaboration between the public and private sectors and avoids prescribing the use of specific technologies.

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Darrell Steinberg is an American politician, attorney and the Mayor of Sacramento in the state of California, USA. As mayor, Steinberg has secured significant resources to tackle problems such as homelessness and economic inequity in Sacramento. He campaigned for and won voter passage of Measure U, a new one-cent sales tax, with the goal of investing in economic development, youth and affordable housing. In an effort to diversify Sacramento’s economy, he pioneers a 'triple helix' model of economic innovation, where government, academia and industry collaborate to transform Sacramento into a “living laboratory” for testing, developing, and scaling ideas, products, and services. His Sacramento Urban Technology Lab actively supports technology development and demonstration throughout different districts in Sacramento, with transformative initiatives on mobility, clean air, healthcare, food and more.

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Jason Hyde is the Senior Shared Mobility Planner at San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), where he helped pioneer the agency's Powered Scooter Share Permit and Pilot Programme. Notably, he established the pilot programme to trial emerging e-scooter technology on the streets of San Francisco and held broad public consultations on how they could be feasibly used. Under his leadership, fixed-term licenses and regular reviews to learn from trials have enabled safe, rapid introduction of shared e-scooters in the city.

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Matthew Klein is Executive Director of the Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity), and the Senior Advisor for Service Innovation in the Mayor's Office of Operations. Klein oversees a portfolio of cross-agency initiatives focused on developing city-wide measures for opportunity and equality, bringing effective anti-poverty approaches to scale, and using technology and data to enhance the delivery of social services. Under his leadership, the office has established a fund to design, test and oversee new programmes and digital products; evaluate anti-poverty approaches; and facilitate data integration across agencies.

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Luis Felipe Salin Monteiro is the Secretary of Digital Government in the Ministry of Economy in Brazil. He is primarily in charge of digital transformation of the federal government and ensuring supply and quality of public services to Brazilian citizens. Previously, as Director of Modernization, he initiated the creation of the InovaGov Network. His work with the network focuses on the continual improvement of processes and services and promotion of a culture of innovation in the public sector. InovaGov's multi-stakeholder network aims to revolutionize the way the public sector conducts its projects, offers services, stimulates generation of creative ideas and solutions, promotes more humane and user-centric policy approaches, and integrates efforts from different sectors.

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Marten Kaevats is the National Digital Advisor at the Government Office of Estonia and a member of the Digital Health Technical Advisory Group (DH-TAG) at the World Health Organization. As Digital Advisor in a country recognised as one of the world’s digital leaders with public IT infrastructure offering unparalleled convenience, security and data-exchange, he plays a key role in the complete embedding of tech and innovation in government. Apart from that, as a member of DH-TAG, he leads the workstream on interoperability governance architecture which includes blueprinting "the plumbing" or linking of healthcare information systems around the world. His team's blueprint will build on Estonia's data governance system and be co-developed by Estonian and Finnish companies. He pioneers the idea of "making all healthcare information systems and databases talk to each other".

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Andrej Safundzic is the founder of Tech4Germany (T4G), the German technology task force which strives to make government more human-centric and effective using technology and design. T4G was initially established as a private startup and was later bought by the German government. It now operates under the direct supervision of the Federal Chief of Staff, with a mission to tackle Germany's digital transformation challenges by bringing the best technologists and creative minds together. Andrej received the 40 Under 40 award by Capital as the youngest person on the list, and in 2019 was named #1 Entrepreneur to Watch in the Policy & Social category by Business Punk.

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Mochamad Ridwan Kamil is an Indonesian architect and politician and the current Governor of the West Java Province. His vision for disruptive digitalisation led to the creation of the West Java Digital Province, which is a flagship initiative that aims to digitally transform government functions through ICT innovation and collaboration with local start-ups. Notably, he also initiated Jabar Digital Service (JDS), a delivery unit responsible for planning and executing rural digitalisation programmes, namely the 'Digital Village' programmes to bridge the digital gap in rural regions. These programmes made internet accessible in far-flung locations in West Java. The Digital Village Fishery benefited the lives of over 225 local fish farmers by increasing their income up to 100%. Kamil also established Jabar Quick Response, a platform for citizens to report accidents, disasters or damages to public facilities, and the appropriate special unit team will be sent to take action. Guided by a forward-thinking mindset, Kamil continuously works on decreasing the digital divide and improving the quality of life in West Java.

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Hidenobu Kubota is the Director of the Type Approval and Recall Division in the Road Transport Bureau at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) in Japan. He has pioneered a regulatory approach to autonomous vehicles that keeps pace with technological change. His approach has been commended internationally and recommended for use in other spheres of technology governance.

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Victor Muñoz is the presidential advisor of economics affairs and digital transformation in Colombia and serves as the first CIO of any Colombian government. During his term, he has enabled the launch of multiple governmental initiatives aiming to strengthen the digital ecosystem in the country. His efforts include the launch of C-Emprende, the largest entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem by the National Government that links academia, private companies, the state and society to strengthen and stimulate the development of entrepreneurship and innovation in the country. He also helped establish the Center for the 4th Industrial Revolution and implemented the gov.co program, as well as the Citizen Digital Services.

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Nadia Webster is Innovation Lead at the Smart Council of the Wellington City Council in New Zealand. As part of the multi-agency Service Innovation Work Programme, she led an experiment with the New Zealand Service Innovation Lab to create machine-readable legislation that makes compliance easier and cheaper. Primarily, she led a multidisciplinary team to rewrite two pieces of legislation as software code - the Better Rules Discovery - which gained worldwide acclaim. She has translated her experience to local delivery, most recently adapting permit application processes into #RulesAsCode for Wellington City Council.

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Polly Hall is the Director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Procurement Innovation Lab (PIL). The PIL serves as a safe space seeking to transform the agency’s acquisition culture, by enabling and encouraging contracting officers to test new procurement models and take informed risks on innovative improvement models. In her role, Hall has created boot camps to train DHS employees on how to use the lab, having led the making of a workbook containing examples, advice and recommendations for agile acquisitions. She has been a driving force behind many of DHS’s agile procurement efforts, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Grants Management Modernization programme.

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