Field of Expertise

Agriculture, Innovation, Developmental Innovation, AI

Expertise

I'm Josh Thomas, a developer, designer, maker, and award-winning innovation director with over 15 years of experience across various industries, including some of the world's largest creative & advertising agencies, toy manufacturers, award-winning tech startups, and transformational innovation consultancies. With a career devoted to discovering and exploiting opportunities that arise when emerging technologies or business changes create new consumer and user needs, I help organizations build bold entrepreneurial ventures, products, services, platforms and tools. Recently, I received the UN Development Program's 2020 Global Innovator award for my efforts to build hardware IoT tools that combat the spread of COVID-19 in developing countries. Previously I was Chief Innovation Officer & Head of Product at Brandwidth, splitting my time between London and New York offices. I built cross-disciplinary teams of designers, engineers, developers, and strategists focused on new approaches to creating digital or physical products, platforms, and organizational design. Before that, I was the co-founder and CTO of Glorious Labs, a Singapore and London-based Hardware / IoT VR company incubated by Facebook Singapore. Created to design and build new tools that enable consumers to engage with and share VR-ready content, Glorious Labs was engineered with a distributed global team "from the circuit board up" and went on to win "Top Pick" in the AR / VR category at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2018. A passionate globalist, I have worked as a senior tech, creative, and product executive on three continents and have lived in Boston, New York, London, and Hong Kong. I am an avid maker and learner who embraces the unknown, striving to understand the drivers of change, and am dedicated to solving never-before-seen problems with never-before-seen solutions. I am a tri-citizen of the UK, US, and the EU and often work across all three countries and areas.