Description

In five-minute lightning rounds, ten speakers delivered ideas ranging from how desire drives every mass media technology adoption cycle, to why an Oscar-winning animation was made for $4 million, to how Harvard neuroscientists are using real-time EEG to predict brain injury before it happens. Ignite Talks at unDavos 2026 packed more paradigm shifts per minute than any other session of the week.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why resilience is a red flag, not a strength — and how "white space" between overlapping sectors like healthcare and energy creates preventable crises
• How strategic foresight and community storytelling across four generations can drive the transition to a regenerative future
• Why artists matter more than ever in the AI era — tools accelerate output, but only humans provide creative direction and cultural meaning
• How every mass media technology from the printing press to AI agents was adopted fastest through its most unmentionable use case
• How the designer of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is launching The New Division to build elegant solutions that benefit individuals, society, and nature simultaneously

SPEAKERS

• Melissa Stires — Global Growth Officer, MIA AI & CEO, Fundamental Well-Being Foundation (Host)
• Dr. Steph Sharma — Founder & Managing Director, Symbio Strategies
• Dr. Chris Luebkeman — Strategic Foresight Hub, ETH Zurich & Founder, Your 2040
• Danar Worya — Founder & Creative Director, Bright Winter Studio
• Haley Draznin — CMO, Premise AI
• Lee — COO, Premise AI
• Dr. Claudia Friedrich — Harvard Faculty & Board Member, Equiterra
• Lucian Tarnowski — Founding Curator, United Planet & The UP Game
• Jakob Trollbäck — Designer of the UN SDGs & Founder, The New Division

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: Ignite Talks, lightning talks, resilience, strategic foresight, world building, AI and art, mass media history, technology adoption, neuroscience, brain monitoring, anesthesia EEG, United Planet, Sustainable Development Goals, climate misinformation, Hispanic leadership, Latin America, systems change, regenerative future, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

TRANSCRIPT

Hello friends, hello friends, if you are here for the Ignite Talks, then you are in the right room. If you are watching for the Ignite Talks, hi mom, hi other people's moms, you are on the right stage, you're in the right channel. We are so excited to have you here. My name is Melissa Toni Stiers, and I will be your host with the most for this wonderful time together, and I am just really excited and honored to be back at Endavos. I spend my life at the intersection of technology and well-being, and there's so much that I have to read it to you because I'm so busy. I love human connection though, that's my favorite thing, and I love to bring people together from different worlds, which is exactly what's happening today in this room. I am a proud founding partner and the current global growth officer at MIA.AI. I want to give a shout out to my CEO and the co-founder of MIA.AI, Yana Salakangas, who is in the audience. She is a fantastic leader, and she's created MIA, which is one of the most, if not the most human-centric AI companies in the world. I'm also the CEO of the Fundamental Well-Being Foundation on behalf of the foundation. Each one of our speakers is going to get a book from our lead scientist that just talks about what it's like to be a finder, which happens to be the name of an app that we recently launched. At MIA.AI, we believe that the greatest risk to AI, to the AI era, is wasted human potential. And at MIA, we combine a blended lear