Michela Magas is an innovation catalyst who bridges the worlds of science and art, design and technology, and academic research and industry, with a track record of over 25 years of innovation. She is innovation advisor to the European Commission and the G7 leaders, and the creator of the Industry Commons.
In 2017 she was awarded European Woman Innovator of the Year and in 2016 she was presented with an Innovation Luminary Award for Creative Innovation.
She is the founder of Music Tech Fest, a global community platform of over 7000 creative innovators and scientific researchers. The platform provides a test case for innovation in areas as diverse as neuroscience, forestry and microcomputing, and has been hosted worldwide by partners including Microsoft Research New England, Centre Pompidou in Paris and the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in London.
Magas has been Innovation Director of #MusicBricks – a European Innovation Action project that placed exclusive tools developed by some of the best music tech research centres in Europe into the hands of creative developers and makers, and has taken them to market. The project registered over 5M impacts on social media and yielded multiple patents and products in a very short time, generating its own innovation ecosystem, which has now been scaled up into the Industry Commons.
Magas co-founded Stromatolite Design Innovation Lab in 2000, developing futures concepts for a series of international clients including Apple, Nike and Nokia with Peter Russel-Clarke, who is now part of the Apple Industrial Design Team.
She was Scientific Director of MIReS, a European Commission-funded project investigating the future of music technology, in conjunction with seven of the top music technology research centres in Europe. Her work has received the ‘art meets science’ NEM art award twice and has been included in the Future of British Innovation at the Science Museum during the London 2012 Olympics. She has served as jury member of Prix Ars Electronica.