Dr Laura James engineers new technologies to help people and society, and has very varied experience getting things done in innovative and evolving organisations. She is co-Founder of Makespace, a community workshop and inventing shed in Cambridge. Laura was previously CEO of Open Knowledge, a global non-profit network unlocking knowledge to empower people.  Laura has worked at startups including AlertMe.com, a connected home system, where she was the first employee and VP Engineering, and Evi.com (now part of Amazon), building an AI platform for conversational search. Now Laura is helping ideaSpace develop a new programme, the innovationLabs, which uses cross-disciplinary applied research to tackle systemic societal challenges and create new ventures to address them. ideaSpace was founded to create the best possible environment for ideas and people coming out of the university to get started on new high impact ventures, and to be the best place for the university ideaSpace isn't exclusively for the university. ideaSpace is home to over 100 members who range from new graduates to repeat entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital and taken companies public.