Getting the Balance Right: Technological Innovation, Economics and Geopolitics

Professor Michael Spence is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Philip H Knight Professor and Dean, Emeritus, at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the chairman of an independent Commission on Growth and Development, created in 2006 and focused on growth and poverty reduction in developing countries.

In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to the analysis of markets with asymmetric information.

Spence’s work has had a profound impact on various fields of economics, including labor economics, financial economics and industrial organisation. His contributions to signaling theory have provided valuable insights into how individuals and firms interact in markets with asymmetric information. This theory explores how individuals or firms can use signals to convey information about their unobservable qualities to others.

Co-authored by former PM Gordon Brown, Dr. Mohamed El-Erian and Michael Spence, the book ‘Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World’ (with Reid Lidow, September 2023, Simon & Schuster) has put forward a strategy to prevent crises.

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive and investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses. In 2003 he co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service and in 2009 he joined Greylock as a partner.

In 2022, Hoffman co-founded Inflection AI, an AI studio that created Pi. In 2025, he co-founded Manas AI, a company that leverages proprietary AI and best in class biology to cure cancer.

He currently serves on the boards of Aurora, Entrepreneur First, Microsoft, Nauto and a few early-stage companies still in stealth. In addition, he serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Endeavor, CZ Biohub, Berggruen Institute, Opportunity@Work, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the MacArthur Foundation’s Lever for Change.

He is the host of 2 award-winning podcasts. This includes ‘Masters of Scale’, where iconic business leaders share strategies that have helped them grow as well as ‘Possible’, a podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future and what it will take to get there.

He is an Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford and a graduate of Stanford University. Reid is intended Dean’s Distinguished Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School

He is the co-author of 6 best-selling books:

Dr El-Erian read Economics as an undergraduate scholar at Queens’ and completed his MPhil and DPhil at Oxford University which was also in Economics.

He is a columnist at Bloomberg News, a Financial Times contributing editor and a trustee of several non-profits. He sits on two corporate boards and has advised governments, industrial and financial companies. He was chair of President Obama’s Global Development Council, a Deputy Director at the International Monetary Fund and President of Harvard Management Company.

Throughout his career, Dr El-Erian has been involved with universities and think tanks around the world. He is a Senior Global Fellow of the Lauder Institute and Professor of Practice at The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), having served on the boards of the International Center for Research on Women and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is on the executive committee of the National Bureau for Economic Research and co-chairs Cambridge’s Collegiate University capital campaign Dear World, Yours Cambridge.

He is presently Chief Economic Adviser at Allianz and Chair of Gramercy Fund Management, having served as the Chief Executive and was co-Chief Investment Officer of PIMCO.