Digital Acceleration and Innovation for Business Recovery and Growth

Gopi Ganesalingam is a finance professional and an entrepreneur who has served in executive and board positions in the Asia Pacific region for the last 30 years. Gopi has worked in brand names like Matsushita, American Express International, Lucent Technologies, Telstra Australia, Salesforce.com and Google. Gopi is now the Vice President of Global Growth Acceleration at Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation Berhad (MDEC), the government agency tasked with developing Malaysia’s Digital Economy. At MDEC, Gopi is at the forefront of championing talented entrepreneurs, by empowering them to actualise their business vision. Gopi is passionate about developing Malaysia’s nascent Digital Economy towards achieving sustainable and inclusive socioeconomic development. His end goal is to connect and propel the global digital economies via government intervention, business chambers, aligning investors/funders, government and business chambers, all of which will link global tech entrepreneurs.

Aireen Omar is AirAsia Group’s President (airasia Digital). She is responsible for AirAsia’s digital strategy, promoting innovation throughout the group and encouraging collaboration across AirAsia’s businesses and markets. She oversees large, digital strategic group-wide initiatives to help transform AirAsia Group into a global, cloud and data-driven and platform company. At airasia Digital, Aireen is also pivotal in incubating and growing the digital and fintech businesses such as BigLife, BigPay, Teleport, Santan and in transforming airasia.com into more than just an airline platform. She is also a non-executive director of Tune Protect Group Berhad. Prior to this, Aireen was AirAsia Malaysia Executive Director and CEO. Aireen joined AirAsia in January 2006 as Director of Corporate Finance, portfolio expanding quickly to also include Treasury, Fuel Procurement and Investor Relations functions. Taking on these roles, she was instrumental in shaping the development of AirAsia into one of the fastest growing and most highly-acclaimed airlines globally. She is an Economics graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and also holds a Masters in Economics from New York University.

Dr. Suraya specializes on the human side of innovation, focusing on leadership, culture and capability for innovation and transformation, and passionate about making the soft side of innovation tangible and measurable. She has been involved in innovation strategy, design and implementation, at a national level in Malaysia. These range from development of an innovation index to accelerate innovation in the corporate sector, to creating blueprints for open innovation, to designing strategies to spur innovation and entrepreneurship at a national level. The latest project involved creating a regulatory framework for private online healthcare services in Malaysia. Her current focus is in helping countries and organisations create the talent pipeline and capability to embrace digital transformation. At a country level, she is exploring the concept of anticipatory regulation, while helping governments and organisations transform using digital tools. Dr Suraya co-authored the book ‘Leading InnovAsian: Embedding Innovation Culture in Malaysian Organisations’ and has also published numerous articles on innovation. The latest, appearing in the Asian Management Insights journal is entitled ‘Corporate Innovation: Digitising Innovation Management’. Besides this she has also been interviewed on BFM radio station and featured multiple times on Astro Awani. She has worked with a portfolio of prominent public and private sector clients, ranging from governments in the SEA region and some of the top Fortune 500 companies in Malaysia. She has spoken on innovation at several international conferences and is also a faculty member for DUKE Corporate Education.

Freddy is a former management consultant, speaker and a data analytics practitioner who values culture, human centricity and excellence. Trained as a computer scientist in AI and Security, Freddy has 20 years of experience in consulting, strategic planning, digital transformation and business building. Freddy brings a unique global perspective having served international clients with a local lens having led analytics transformation for local business. At Fusionex, Freddy focuses on developing new lines of businesses whilst also spearheading the client’s data transformation journey. His passion lies in developing team culture and leveraging the power of tech to transform the way we work. When he is not working, Freddy loves to dive head first into random hobbies, the latest of which is bee farming and hydroponics.