Linda Bernardi

With a passion for innovation & leadership, Linda Bernardi possesses a unique vision and a fierce commitment to promoting innovative, disruptive ideas and technologies. In her role as “innovation provocateur,” Linda helps organizations break free of their comfort zone, defy conventional wisdom, and shatter outdated paradigms in their quest for marketchanging products, services and methods.

As the former EVP, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Element AI, she was responsible for product development, strategy, architecture, academic, research & innovation programs. Previously, Linda was Chief Innovation Officer at IBM for IoT and Cloud. Her focus was the integration of Watson’s cognitive capabilities into the IoT and new product offerings, enabling IBM’s Fortune 100 customers to introduce IoT, AI and cognitive capabilities into their operations and thrive in the Hyper-connected world.

Upon leaving IBM, her focus was to complete her second book, The Inversion Factor, discussing the mindset shift in enterprises from ‘product-first’ to ‘needs-first’ mentality and the evolution of IoT in the hyper-connected world. Inversion will be critical for survival for enterprises and was released by MIT Press in October 2017.

Linda’s first book, ProVoke (2011) discusses the necessity of disruption in order to innovate. The global landscape of innovation is discussed as well as how to work through the 5 stages of resistance to disruption. Unless these resistances are dealt with, enterprises cannot innovate at a meaningful rate. ProVoke was followed in 2013 with the ProVoke Methodology, the How to ProVoke handbook for the enterprise.

Linda has delivered hundreds of talks at large companies, tech and innovation events & conferences around the globe and has reached tens of thousands of readers and followers of disruption and innovation. She has proudly and deliberately created the Culture of Disruption in large companies leading to innovation.

Linda is the founder and CEO of StraTerra Partners, a technology strategy consulting firm, working closely with large enterprises and technology developers to help companies disrupt in order to innovate and think out of the box. Critical to Linda is also the mindful connection between enterprises and the ‘right’ startups to add value and help the agile innovation transformation of enterprises. Linda is a serial entrepreneur and in 2001, she founded ConnecTerra, Inc., a Cambridge, MA-based software provider connecting RFID technology to large enterprise IT. Today RFID is considered to be the genesis and enabler of IoT. After selling the company in 2006, she became an avid early-stage technology startup investor in Seattle, Silicon Valley, California, Utah, New York, Europe and India.