Radical Resourcefulness Lab
A practical session on mobilizing collaborators, working across silos, building credibility before the complete solution exists, and making useful progress with incomplete resources.
Ask about this sessionKeynotes
Three distinct ways to see the future differently.
These are Helen's current keynote programs, available for booking. Each one is adapted to your audience, industry, and program length — she reviews your objectives before the event and tailors stories and examples accordingly.
01Innovation
Innovation Under Constraint
How ambitious teams make meaningful progress when resources are limited, conditions are uncertain, and the traditional playbook no longer works.
Organizations often assume that innovation begins with more money, more time, or better conditions. But meaningful breakthroughs frequently begin when constraints expose weak assumptions and force sharper choices. Drawing on Helen's experience assembling an interdisciplinary effort around the challenge of building for Mars, this keynote explores how teams can distinguish genuine limitations from inherited conventions, mobilize resources creatively, and begin making credible progress before certainty arrives. Radical resourcefulness — recruiting unconventional allies and building credibility before the complete solution exists — runs through the whole talk.
Audience outcomes
- Identify assumptions that quietly restrict progress.
- Reframe constraints as useful strategic information.
- Turn a large ambition into credible next steps.
- Build momentum without lowering technical or ethical standards.
Best for
Technology companies, innovation conferences, leadership programs, founder communities, architecture and engineering organizations, and teams pursuing difficult new initiatives.
Formats
- 45–60 minute keynote
- 25-minute conference talk
- Fireside conversation
- Leadership event
Helen's relevant experience
- Leadership of an interdisciplinary Mars-habitat project
- Technology entrepreneurship
- Recruiting collaborators around an improbable objective
- Moving a technical project forward with limited resources
- Communicating an ambitious vision without abandoning rigor
Each keynote is shaped around the audience, industry, event theme, and program length. Helen works with organizers in advance to select the most relevant stories, examples, and takeaways.
02Futurism
The Future, Designed
A grounded exploration of the technologies reshaping how humans will live, work, build, move, and explore.
The future is not created by a single breakthrough. It emerges when technologies, institutions, human behavior, and physical systems begin changing one another. In this visually engaging keynote, Helen draws on her background in architecture, bioengineering, advanced technology, entrepreneurship, and space-habitat development to explore the signals shaping the coming decades. Rather than offering predictions as certainty, she gives audiences a practical way to distinguish meaningful change from hype and think more clearly about the futures they are helping create.
Subject areas may include
- Artificial intelligence and human-machine collaboration
- Robotics and autonomous systems
- Additive manufacturing
- Future cities and infrastructure
- Space-derived technologies
- New approaches to mobility, construction, and habitation
- The convergence of digital, biological, and physical technologies
Audience outcomes
- Distinguish durable technological signals from short-term hype.
- Understand how technologies converge and amplify one another.
- Consider second-order effects on work, cities, organizations, and daily life.
- Identify which future possibilities deserve preparation now.
Best for
General innovation conferences, technology companies, universities, science and design organizations, architecture events, future-of-work programs, museums, associations, and public lecture series.
Formats
- 45–60 minute keynote
- Trend briefing
- Conference talk
- Fireside conversation
- Student or public lecture
Helen's relevant experience
- Architecture and the built environment
- PhD in Bioengineering from Caltech
- Advanced technology and manufacturing
- Space-habitat development
- Technology entrepreneurship and ecosystem development
- Previous public talks about future technologies
Each keynote is shaped around the audience, industry, event theme, and program length. Helen works with organizers in advance to select the most relevant stories, examples, and takeaways.
03Interdisciplinary Thinking
The Interdisciplinary Advantage
Why the most consequential breakthroughs happen between fields—and how teams can see what specialists working alone may miss.
The problems that matter most rarely fit inside one discipline. Yet organizations still divide expertise into departments, professional languages, and incentives that make genuine collaboration difficult. Drawing on a career spanning architecture, bioengineering, technology entrepreneurship, advanced manufacturing, and space-habitat development, Helen explores what becomes possible when different ways of thinking are brought into the same room. This keynote shows why interdisciplinary work is not simply assembling diverse résumés. It requires translation, intellectual humility, productive disagreement, and structures that allow specialists to combine their depth without retreating into silos.
Audience outcomes
- Recognize when a problem requires multiple forms of expertise.
- Translate ideas across technical, creative, and commercial groups.
- Create productive collaboration without weakening specialist rigor.
- Use unfamiliar perspectives to reveal overlooked assumptions and solutions.
- Build teams around the problem rather than around existing departmental boundaries.
Best for
Research organizations, universities, R&D teams, architecture and engineering firms, design organizations, innovation conferences, technical companies, and leadership programs.
Formats
- 45–60 minute keynote
- Conference talk
- University lecture
- Panel or fireside conversation
- Interdisciplinary team session
Helen's relevant experience
- Architecture
- Bioengineering
- Technology entrepreneurship
- Advanced manufacturing
- Work across science, design, engineering, and commercial teams
- Leadership of a project requiring multiple disciplines to work toward one technical goal
Each keynote is shaped around the audience, industry, event theme, and program length. Helen works with organizers in advance to select the most relevant stories, examples, and takeaways.
Optional extensions
Go deeper with a facilitated session.
Available alongside a keynote when a program has room for smaller-group work.
Leading Through Uncertainty
A leadership session focused on adaptive decisions, hidden dependencies, scenario thinking, and balancing efficiency with resilience.
Ask about this sessionInterdisciplinary Collaboration Lab
A facilitated session helping teams identify communication barriers between disciplines, translate different forms of expertise, and restructure a live organizational problem around the challenge rather than departmental ownership.
Ask about this sessionSee Helen onstage
Archival recordings of Helen speaking at prior events.
The Speaking Gallery collects full talks, technical presentations, founder stories, pitches, and interviews under their original event titles — evidence of Helen's stage presence, storytelling, and range, separate from the keynote programs above.
Explore the Speaking GalleryNot sure which keynote fits your program?
Send your audience and objectives — Helen will recommend the strongest keynote and a format that fits your agenda.