Katharine English

Head of Innovation Programs, Engineering Excellence at Google

Speaker

Katharine is a senior innovation and transformation leader with over 25 years of experience helping Fortune 500 companies harness the power of continuous innovation to transform into digital-first businesses. As Head of Innovation Programs for Google Cloud, she focuses on developing and delivering co-innovation initiatives with a diverse array of Google Cloud customers, leading a cross-functional team of solution engineers, business strategists, and UX engineers to bring the best minds together to solve our customers’ toughest challenges. Before joining Google, Katharine was the Americas Lead for Global Business Strategy and Transformation at Microsoft, focused on large-scale transformation and co-innovation with some of Microsoft’s most strategic customers. Since the mid-1990s, Katharine's professional journey has been focused on creating and sustaining efficient, innovative, culturally aligned, and profitable businesses in the digital economy. She has core competencies in designing and delivering innovation programs, digital business modeling, cloud computing, new product development, and driving business success at every point along the customer journey. She has held executive roles at CNET, AOL, Discovery Communications, NBC, and Virtusa Consulting. Katharine earned her BA in English and Philosophy from Rockhurst University. She holds an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business, and an MLA in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University. She is a graduate of the Stanford Research Institute’s Innovation Program, The Five Disciplines of Innovation, and has been a design thinking practitioner for over 15 years. Fun Fact: Katharine was selected as a Featured Filmmaker in the 2005 IFP Film Fest for her screenplay, “Confessions of a Dead Woman."