Bernardo Bortolotti is Associate Professor in economics at the University of Turin and director of the Sovereign Investment Lab at the Paolo Baffi Centre of Central Banking and Financial Regulation at Bocconi University, Milan. His research focuses on the complex relationships between state and markets, with special emphasis on state ownership of firms, regulation and corporate governance. He is an expert in privatisation, state-assets management and divestiture, and sovereign wealth funds. He has been executive director of Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, and has advised the World Bank, the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, the Italian Ministry of the Economy (as secretary of the Global Advisory Committee on Privatisation) and the Italian Audit Office. He is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the founder of the Privatization Barometer.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). At CDDRL, he is also one of the principal investigators in the programmes on Arab Reform and Democracy and on Liberation Technology. He is founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and a senior consultant to the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His latest book, "The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World" (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.

Anthony Townsend is an urban planner and forecaster whose writing, public speaking, activism and consulting focus on urbanisation, ubiquitous computing and technology-led innovation and economic development. He holds posts as Research Director at the Institute for the Future, an independent research organisation based in California's Silicon Valley, and Senior Research Fellow at New York University's Rudin Center for Transportation. He was co-founder of NYCwireless, a pioneer in the community broadband movement, and was named one of Planetizen's "Leading Thinkers in Urban Planning & Technology" and "Top 100 Thinkers" tracking the Internet of Things by Postscapes. His first book, "Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia", is published by W.W. Norton & Co.

Edward Tse is founder of Gao Feng Advisory Company and chairman emeritus, Greater China, at Booz & Company. He has nearly 30 years of management-consulting and senior corporate management experience. Widely known as one of the most experienced and most respected management consultants in Greater China, he specialises in the definition and implementation of business strategies, organisational effectiveness and corporate transformation. He has assisted several hundred companies in various industries, headquartered both within and outside China, on all aspects of business related to China and its integration with the rest of the world. He is an independent board member of three large Chinese industrial state-owned enterprises and author of three books: "Direction" (2007), "The China Strategy" (2010) and "Surpass" (2012).

Richard M. Swanson founded SunPower Corporation in 1991 to develop and commercialise cost-effective photovoltaic power systems. He retired in 2012. Before founding SunPower, he was on the Electrical Engineering faculty at Stanford University. In 2002, he received the William R. Cherry award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for outstanding contributions to the photovoltaic field, and in 2006 was awarded the Becquerel Prize in Photovoltaics by the European Commission. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2008 and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. He received The Economist's 2009 Energy Innovator Award, and in 2010 won the IEEE Jin-ichi Nishizawa Medal for the conception and commercialisation of high-efficiency point-contact solar cell technology. In 2011, he won the Karl Boer Solar Energy Medal of Merit.