As former Vice President and Corporate Director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia, Leif Edvinsson has been a key contributor to the theory of IC. Under his guidance, Skandia was the first company in the world to produce an Intellectual Capital Annual Report.

Leif tackles the challenges of maximising corporate brainpower, a topic which will occupy many of the best business minds in the coming years. He also highlights to his audiences the properties of Intellectual Capital from Knowledge Management, how to measure Intellectual Capital and how to actively manage it, from R&D to education, IT and software.

In light of his work in both training and Intellectual Capital, Edvinsson has been a special advisor on service trade to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is also special advisor to the Swedish Cabinet on the effects of the new digital economy, a special advisor to the United Nations International Trade Center and is a co-founder of the Swedish Coalition of Service Industries.

Leif Edvinsson holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author for numerous articles on the service industry and on Intellectual Capital. In 1997 he published his first book "Intellectual Capital: Realising Your Company's True Value by Finding its Hidden Brainpower". The book has been praised worldwide as the best resource on how to recognise the value of a company's intellectual assets, which Edvinsson argues, can far exceed the value of its physical assets.

Leif is a regular speaker before such organisations as the BBC, CIO, Conference Board, Economist, Handelsblatt, Insead, IMD and the American Productivity and Quality Center.

In 1998 Edvinsson won the prestigious Brain of the Year Award, in competition with Bill Gates and Sir Paul McCartney. Edvinsson follows in the footsteps of former winners such as Prof. Stephen Hawking, Garry Kasparov (World Chess Champion) and Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. In 2000 he was listed on the top 20 list of the Most Admired Knowledge Leaders in the World. Currently, Edvinsson heads his own IC' prototyping firm, Universal Networking Intellectual Capital (UNIC), based in Sweden.

A pioneer for his ground-breaking application of Intellectual Capital, Leif Edvinsson is a distinguished guest speaker around the globe.

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