Interview Laurent Haug: ”Connecting people with ideas, and ideas with people”

Laurent Haug: In 2004 I worked for a very large and successful company. Though it had been clear to me since the 90’s that the internet would bring about fundamental changes, my employer had that very Swiss belief that things can never change too radically, that there is no need to worry about emerging models and technologies. I did not agree with that vision at all. Around the same time I attended a conference called Reboot in Denmark. Its main theme was how the internet would change society, business and the world. Afterwards, I figured that we need this kind of discussion in Switzerland, and Lift was born.

Kind of. Maybe being a French immigrant allowed me to see this country from a different angle. In the late 90’s I studied at the University of Lausanne. There the tech infrastructure was so much better than what my friends had back home. Everyone had an email address and access to yahoo. standford.edu and other early resources. This opened up all kinds of doors for me personally, while at the same time making me realize that Switzerland had the potential to be huge in the digital world. What was missing was awareness of this.

If your business is information, all you need to do your job is internet access. So if you could choose where to live, Switzerland should be pretty high on anybody’s list, right? Especially once you have kids. We have great health care, good public schools, the country is very secure, there are plenty of well-educated English speakers, and we have worldclass research centers. The list is long. But somehow all this did not translate into Switzerland taking a leading role in this new digital world. I think my work at Lift was about trying to make locals realize the potential they had. I wanted to create a platform for the kind of discourse I knew was vital to navigate the future of society as a whole.

Maybe, but I think time has proven me right to some degree. If you look at the topics we covered in 2006: DRM, data security, freedom of expression, etc. Essentially these are all deep social questions. I remember distinctly being interviewed at the time and hearing that what I was putting together was a nerd conference. I don’t think anybody would make this claim today. These themes have gone mainstream now. Nobody can ignore the privacy issues technologies are raising, for example.

No, I always envisaged Lift to be more about technology’s impact on society. In my opinion, computers will cease to be considered as something separate from business or society. No company has an English department after all, though everybody speaks it. I think the same will be true about IT in the future. It will be everywhere, and stop being a topic by itself.

We were the first to share our talks online for free. Today nearly everybody does that. We were among the first to use online ticketing as well. Though there was a bit of luck involved because right around then online ticketing companies like Amiando sprang up. We kind of helped each other into the world at large. Now Amiando is a very successful company that was sold to Xing.

I was lucky and privileged to run Lift. The company experienced huge growth and I was able to organize close to 15 events on two continents in just seven years. But anybody running events knows how stressful a job it can be. After the birth of my first daughter, I wanted to travel less, settle down a bit more. And I felt that all the ingredients for Lift to continue without me were in place. Sylvie Reinhard, who joined the project in 2007, took over as CEO, thus providing continuity and adding to the stability provided by a visionary investor in the person of Abir Oreibi. I’m happy to let Lift continue in its current form, and in very capable hands.

Because of my work as an innovation curator, people kept asking me to help them make sense of what is going on. So I became a consultant and a coach. I help my clients understand the impact of innovations on their business model, building innovation programs for large companies or working with lean startups. This turned me into a public speaker as well because my clients asked me to spread these ideas within their organizations. And now this has turned into another event — again.

I think global and local are not mutually exclusive. Ideas and technologies are global, but the way they interact with society is location-specific. Instead of doing one global event, I am now more interested in several local gatherings, all adapted to a specific place.

In some ways yes, but I don’t work 20 hours a day. I just found a way to leverage my strengths into different channels. My take on innovations is my content. This is supplemented by this great network of people around me. And I bring all this to other people. I call it ‚Connecting people with ideas, and ideas with people‘.

I think Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA spying will have a huge impact. It might be the best thing that has happened to European IT in years.

Data security is important, especially for corporations. What Snowden has shown is that you can’t place your trust in US companies when it comes to sensitive, competitive information. If people in Europe are a bit smart about this, a huge market just opened for them.