Author and entrepreneur extraordinaire Josh Linkner will be the keynote speaker of the Executive Strategies Breakfast to kick off the BizTech Expo and Conference to be presented by BizTimes Media LLC May 11-12.
Linkner is the founder, chairman and former CEO of ePrize, the largest interactive promotion agency in the world. Over the past 12 years, ePrize has grown to have more than 1,200 employees and provides digital marketing services for 74 of the top 100 brands in the world.
The BizTech Expo and Conference at Wisconsin State Fair Park is the state’s largest business-to-business event, featuring more than 200 booth exhibitors, a series of seminars for executives and awards programs saluting the region’s most dynamic companies and entrepreneurs.
Business executives throughout southeastern Wisconsin are invited to attend to the Executive Strategies Breakfast at the Expo on May 11, when Linkner will share insights and inspiration about how to use creativity to grow their companies.
Linkner is the author of a new book, “Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity” (Jossey-Bass/Wiley). The book, which will be unveiled in February, is intended to help companies and nonprofit agencies jumpstart their imagination and build creative, more successful organizations.
Linkner’s insights are helping companies in a variety of applications:
- New product innovation.
- Building and leading creative cultures.
- Creative approaches to sales and marketing.
- Crafting differentiated competitive strategies.
- Expanding into new markets.
- Unorthodox problem solving.
- Applying creativity to startups and high-growth companies.
“One idea is all it takes. One idea is all it takes to change your career. One idea is all it takes to change your company. One idea is all it takes to change your state. One idea is all it takes to change America. One idea is all it takes to change the world. And if you think about it, one idea is the only thing that ever has,” Linkner said.
Linkner has been featured in hundreds of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, AdAge, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and AdWeek, and he is a frequent keynote speaker at industry events and conferences. He has won multiple business, technology and design awards, including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, The Inc. 500 (six years in a row), Crain’s Detroit Business 40 under 40, Fast Company’s Fast 50, the Detroit Executive of the Year and the Automation Alley CEO of the Year.
Linkner led ePrize’s expansion into new industries, including travel, automotive, financial services, consumer packaged goods, retail, and entertainment. Linkner contributed to ePrize’s geographic expansion, opening offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, Detroit, Atlanta and London. Additionally, he led the firm through two rounds of financing and two recapitalizations, securing over $43 million of investment.
As an early Internet marketing visionary, Linkner founded and built one of the first web marketing agencies, GlobalLink New Media, in 1995. The firm ultimately was sold to a publicly traded firm.
Previously, he was the founder and CEO of two other successful technology companies.
By age 30, Linkner had started four companies and sold three of them.
Linkner recently launched his fifth company, Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm. Along with business partners Dan Gilbert and Brian Hermelin, Linkner is actively investing in early-stage technology companies looking to help rebuild the Detroit region through entrepreneurship.
To learn more about Linkner’s mission to make the world a more creative planet, read his blog at www.JoshLinkner.com.
Attendees of the Executive Strategies breakfast will receive a copy of Linkner’s new book. For more information and to register to attend the event, visit www.biztimes.com/strategies.
