ABOUT THE SUMMIT
CrossDive is Turian Labs’ a global foresight and insight summit, bringing together business leaders, policymakers, researchers, designers, startup founders and strategy practitioners to make sense of a world where legacy models no longer hold.
The future is arriving through overlapping extremes. Geopolitical realignments, AI, demographic transitions, urbanisation, and resource pressures are no longer isolated trends. They are interacting, amplifying one another, and reshaping how societies, markets, and institutions function.
CrossDive explores these global shifts through India’s lens: a country where scale, speed, diversity, digital adoption, and institutional change make the future visible in unusually intense ways.
The summit combines two lenses. Foresight helps decode emerging signals and map multiple plausible futures. Human insight grounds those futures in lived realities, changing behaviours, and evolving expectations.
The goal is not to predict the future. It is to improve the quality of decisions made today.
Where insight meets
anticipation
What should India build over the next decade?
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What will a more ambitious India want to buy, experience and become?
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Where will the next engines of growth come from?
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Which sectors and capabilities will define India's next phase of growth?
04 EXPANDING ASPIRATIONS
What is next when machines are smarter than us?
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What will humans still do better?
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How will AI change jobs, skills and education?
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How do we preserve human agency in increasingly automated systems?
03 BEYOND INTELLIGENCE
What changes when we all live and work longer?
02 AGELESS LIVING
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What happens to education, careers and retirement?
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How should businesses serve customers across many more life stages?
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How do we build workplaces for five generations?
01 DEFRAGMENTATION OF THE WORLD
How should India navigate a fragmented world?
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Who should India trade, build and partner with?
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How can Indian businesses reduce dependence on any one country or bloc?
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Can India become a bridge between competing powers?
FOur QUESTIONS for the next decade
Building the perspectives leaders need to navigate uncertainty, shape long-term vision and make better decisions in a rapidly changing world.
THE PROGRAMME
Meet the
speakers
Dr. Sari Arho Havrén
Geopolitical Strategist, China Expert, and Foresight Practitioner, Business Finland
Dr. Sari Arho Havrén is a geopolitical strategist, China expert, and foresight practitioner with extensive experience across Europe and Asia. Her work focuses on great-power competition, China’s global ambitions, geopolitical risk, and shifting international alliances.
Dr. Anu Raghunathan
Scientist and Systems Biologist, CSIR–National Chemical Laboratory
Dr. Anu Raghunathan is a scientist and systems biologist whose research spans synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and cellular systems. Her work offers a unique perspective on how biotechnology is reshaping health, sustainability, and the future relationship between humans and living systems.
Dr. Kaustav Sengupta
Head/Director-Insights & Associate Professor, Futurist and colour psychologist, NIFT
Dr. Kaustav Sengupta is a futurist, cultural strategist, and design academician with over 25 years of experience in foresight research, youth culture, and emerging consumer trends. His work explores the socio-cultural and behavioural shifts shaping India’s future.
Riaz Mulla
Head, Leadership Learning,
Tech Mahindra
Riaz Mulla builds enterprise-scale leadership pipelines, moving 70% of leadership talent into stretch roles and filling half of critical positions from within. A Gestalt-influenced practitioner and published author, he studies how technology reshapes the way people lead when old certainties no longer hold.
Dr. Ranjan Banerjee
Vice Chancellor and Professor, Nayanta University
Dr. Ranjan Banerjee is an academic leader and design thinker who leads Nayanta University, a new world-class institution being built out of Pune. Former Dean of SPJIMR and founding Dean of BITSOM, his work spans innovation, behavioural economics, scenario planning, and change management across leading business schools and global corporates.
Sophia Tran
FOUNDER & CEO
SPOTLIGHT!
Sophia Tran is the Founder & CEO of Spotlight!, an active Business Angel, and a tech creator. Having previously helped build DIGITALHUB.DE, she also serves as a Spokesperson for the German Startup Association and an Advisory Board member for the Young Digital Economy, bringing unique insights to the intersection of technology, business, and innovation.
Dhaval Kothari
Co-Founder, Design researcher and speculative futures strategist, Lagori Collective
Dhaval Kothari is a futures practitioner and design researcher with over 13 years of experience across social research, law, impact investment, behaviour change, and design. His work focuses on participatory research, strategic foresight, and building imagination infrastructure for communities and organisations.
Srinivas Venkatram
Founder & CEO,
Illumine Knowledge Resources
Srinivas Venkatram has spent over 25 years pioneering approaches that enable large-scale human systems to evolve in response to rapid change. He has architected interventions reaching over five million people across business, government, communities and education, including some of India's largest public-service institutions.
Ayaz Basrai
Co-Founder, speculative design and cultural research expert, The Busride Design Studio & The Busride Lab
Ayaz Basrai is a designer, researcher, and co-founder of The Busride Design Studio. His work spans architecture, interiors, immersive environments, heritage conservation, and futures research. Through The Busride Lab, he explores the intersection of design, culture, technology, and emerging futures, bringing a unique perspective on how built environments shape human experiences and societal change.
Steven Lichty
Strategic Foresight Consultant, Co-Founder & Managing Partner,
REAL Consulting Group
Dr. Steven Lichty is a strategic foresight practitioner and researcher with over 25 years of experience working across 100+ countries. He advises governments, international organizations, and NGOs on foresight, systems thinking, governance, and resilient futures, with a strong focus on Africa.
Harsh Mittal
UX Research, Google
Harsh Mittal is a UX researcher at Google, working at the intersection of technology adoption, digital inclusion, and emerging-market behaviour. His research across India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia has informed products serving millions of users, offering unique insights into how rising aspirations, local cultures, and digital ecosystems shape everyday lives.
Divya Chadha
Director, UX Research,
Jiostar
Divya Chadha is a design leader and Director of UX Research at JioHotstar. An engineer-turned-design-researcher from MIT Institute of Design, Pune, she works across user research, social megatrend spotting, and future scenario building, having shaped products for Google, Samsung, Mahindra, Medtronic, and Stryker.
Dr. Trish Lavery
Strategic Foresight Consultant, Former OECD Strategic Foresight Counsellor
Dr. Trish Lavery is a strategic foresight expert working at the intersection of emerging technologies, geopolitics, and public policy. She has advised governments and international organisations, including the OECD and the Australian Government, on anticipatory governance, AI futures, climate security, and long-term policy development.
Dr. Premnath Venugopalan
Head, NCL Innovations, CSIR-NCL & Founder Director, Venture Center
Dr. Premnath Venugopalan is a technologist and innovation leader working across technology development, commercialization, and deep-tech entrepreneurship. His work spans biomedical innovation, incubation, technology transfer, and building science-led ventures.
Vivek Y. Kelkar
Risk Analyst and Researcher, Money Control Columnist and Speaker
Vivek Y. Kelkar is an independent researcher, risk analyst, columnist and speaker specializing in geopolitics, geo-economics, sustainability and climate policy, with a regional focus on South Asia, China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He combines political economy and strategy expertise with extensive corporate, advisory and media experience, and is a weekly columnist for Moneycontrol and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore.
Nils Müller
FUTURIST, FOUNDER & CEO,
TRENDONE
Nils Müller has given well over 1,000 keynotes on national and international stages, making him one of the most experienced voices in future thinking. He founded TrendONE in 2002 and the global LaFutura network, and takes audiences on interactive expeditions into the world of tomorrow.
Sagar Vishnoi
Director & Co-Founder,
Future Shift Labs
Sagar Vishnoi works across global AI governance, Indian policy, and citizen impact. He has been awarded by the United Nations and spoken at TEDx, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, the European Parliament, the British Parliament, and 60+ global forums and think tanks.
Dr. Ambuj Chaturvedi
Surgeon, Director, Professional Education, Johnson & Johnson MedTech India
Dr. Ambuj Chaturvedi is a healthcare innovator with experience across Johnson & Johnson MedTech India, Medtronic, Covidien, IKP Knowledge Park, and Fortis Healthcare. His work spans clinical innovation, medtech education, emerging market R&D, and healthcare management.
Robert Radloff
Head of Strategy, Change & Communication, Airbus / President, La Futura - Global Trend Network
Robert Radloff is a strategist and change leader with 20+ years in innovation, trend research, and leadership culture. He leads Strategy, Change & Communication at Airbus, heads the La Futura trend network, and advocates failure culture to help organisations take smarter risks and adapt.
Anna Biswas
Managing Director, India, Forum for the Future
Anna Biswas leads Forum for the Future's work in India, partnering with business, government and philanthropy on complex sustainability challenges. In nearly two decades at Forum, she has applied futures techniques to strategy and innovation, with a focus on systems change and multi-stakeholder collaboration.
Sandip Shinde
Founder, Agri Founders Field
Co-Founder, RootGravity Fund & Kumbhathon Innovation Foundation | Additional Director, Sahyadri Farms
Sandip Shinde is an innovation and venture-building leader working at the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, agriculture, and investment. He founded Agri Founders Field, an on-farm venture-building initiative. He focuses on connecting frontier technologies, entrepreneurial talent, farmer communities, and capital to build scalable ventures and strengthen India’s innovation ecosystem.
Ankita Trivedi
Cofounder, Living Midnight Narrative Outfit, Senior Assistant Professor, CEPT University
Ankita Trivedi is a futurist, speculative designer and academic exploring how an interdisciplinary design practice can facilitate storytelling across visual art and experiential futures and how our collective imaginations can contribute to creating polyphonic and equitable worlds.
Priya Nagaraj
Head, Green Economy & Innovation, CEEW, Interim CEO, Pune Knowledge Cluster
Priya Nagaraj builds institutions and ecosystems where science, innovation and entrepreneurship meet. She was founding CEO of Pune Knowledge Cluster and earlier supported deep-tech startups at Venture Center. She began her career in pharmaceutical R&D at Advinus Therapeutics and holds a PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of Virginia.
Manoj Kothari
Founder, CEO & Chief Strategist,
Turian Labs. Curator, CrossDive
Manoj Kothari has spent over 25 years helping organisations discover what is changing and what comes next. An engineer, designer and serial entrepreneur, he has advised Google, Meta, Volkswagen, Samsung and the governments of Finland and Dubai. An alumnus of IIT Bombay and NID Ahmedabad, he previously co-founded Onio Design and ITERNIA.
Pankaj Jhunja
Professor of Practice, IDC School of Design and Former Head of Sustainability of Tata
Pankaj Jhunja has spent 36 years moving from product design to business strategy, most of it at Tata Motors. There he grew the design studio from 30 to 110 people, ran the company’s Mobility Innovation Hub in San Francisco, launched its EV subscription service and shaped its roadmap to Net Zero by 2040. Today he teaches, trains Tata Group teams, and advises startups in mobility, climate and agritech.
THE LOCATION
Pune, India
Pune, with a metropolitan population of over 7 million, is one of India's most significant economic and knowledge hubs. It brings together advanced manufacturing, automotive industries, IT services, startups, higher education, scientific research, and deep-tech innovation within a single urban ecosystem.
Strategically located within the Mumbai–Pune–Nashik growth corridor, Pune benefits from seamless expressway connectivity to Mumbai and Nashik, placing it at the center of one of India's most dynamic economic regions. The city is well connected to all major Indian metros through Pune International Airport, while Mumbai's global aviation hub is just a few hours away.
Direct international connections to destinations such as Dubai and Singapore further strengthen Pune's role as a gateway between India and the world.
Beyond economics, Pune is a city of ideas, culture, and civic leadership. Rooted in the traditions of Bhakti (spiritualism) and Shakti (power of self-determination) and shaped by a legacy of learning and social reform, it offers a unique blend of cultural depth and future-facing ambition. Few cities are better positioned to host a conversation on India's future and its place in a rapidly changing world.
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CrossDive is convened by Turian Labs, a Pune-based strategic foresight, design research, and UX strategy consulting firm.
For over a decade, Turian Labs has helped global organizations understand changing human needs, discover emerging opportunities, and design strategies for an uncertain future. Our work combines strategic foresight, ethnographic research, user experience studies, behavioural insights, and design thinking to help leaders make better decisions in complex environments.
Strategic foresight
built in Pune (India)
Turian Labs has also created platforms for dialogue and collective sensemaking. These include IndiaNxt, one of India's early conferences on megatrends and innovation strategy, and DIVE, an ongoing series of conversations exploring creativity, innovation, science, technology, and society through diverse lenses.
CrossDive builds on this legacy, bringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, researchers, designers and technologists to make sense of the forces shaping India and the world.
At Turian Labs, we see the future not as something to be predicted, but as something to be interpreted, designed, and shaped.
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