Biography

Lily has served in the technology and internet industry for over 17 years both as an entrepreneur and as a corporate executive. She was President, APAC at TripAdvisor up until 2016 and had previously held a number of executive roles at Expedia and TripAdvisor across London, Singapore, Beijing and Hong Kong.

Lily is currently an independent non-executive board director of Swire Properties Limited, Octopus Cards Limited as well as a senior advisor for the Boston Consulting Group in China and HotelBeds Group in Europe .

Outside of the board room, she spends her time coding a next-generation food discovery app for travellers with a distributed team of engineers around the world. At the beginning of her career, Lily founded a tech start-up in Cambridge, UK which pioneered the use of wireless charging in mobile devices.

Lily holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Engineering, a Master of Engineering degree with distinction from the University of Cambridge and is pursuing a certificate in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University.

Speech Title and Synopsis

Full-stack Entrepreneurialism in Large Organizations – Starting from the Boardroom

The rapid rise of digital economy in the past decade has created a chasm in traditional large organizations with traditionalists forming the powerbase at the top and digital natives coming in at entry levels.

Many CEOs, with the best intentions, put their focus on hiring the digital talent into the organization and delegate the role of innovation to the youngsters in the hope of seeing some spark bubble up from the ranks.

Full-stack entrepreneurialism is when the bubble up model is paired with a strong pull from an engaged and educated board and C-suite. Rather than putting up a gate with a high burden of proof on employees to pitch an iron-clad business case, entrepreneurial leaders are eager scouts for the next great idea, will recognize a gem in the rough and is prepared to make bold instinctive decisions to help it reach full potential.