What is it?
Labs has an Advisory Board comprised of three internal and three external experts that will provide guidance for the program, portfolio selection, and program curriculum.
Advisory Board members volunteer their time and expertise to help define and shape the program to benefit the selected start-ups and BBC Worldwide goals.
How are board members selected?
Advisory Board members are selected based on their knowledge and expertise in a wide variety of fields including but not limited to venture capital, entrepreneurship, digital media, technology, business strategy, sales, and marketing.
Advisory Board Members
EVP & MD, Digital, BBC Worldwide
Daniel is responsible for driving a unified global digital strategy and consumer vision across BBC Worldwide’s digital portfolio. This includes the organisation’s world-class branded consumer services such as: topgear.com and goodfood.com, as well as owned and operated services like the international lifestyle and genre sections of BBC.com, including BBC Travel and BBC Future. Heaf is also in charge of the organisation’s consumer digital facing services, including the successful portfolio of brands on Facebook and international channels on Youtube.
Heaf also works collaboratively across BBC Worldwide, Global News and the BBC’s Future, Media and Technology division, ensuring effective co-ordination, shared knowledge and information.
Dan began his digital career founding and running a successful start-up. Since then he’s worked for Time Out, AOL and BBC Radio.
Prior to joining BBC Worldwide Dan worked for Channel 4′s corporate venture fund, 4IP.
New Digital Ventures, BBC Worldwide
Jenny Fielding heads up New Digital Ventures for BBC Worldwide as well as BBCW Labs. Previously, she was CEO of fourforty Inc, the company that developed Wenzani for Lonely Planet.
Jenny has a long history in the tech industry, co-founding start-ups such as Switch-Mobile, a disruptive VoIP mobile software company, that was acquired in 2008. She has also been the COO of Wodan Capital, a VP at JP Morgan, and a lawyer at Wieden & Kennedy, where she started her career.
She sits on the Board and advises several companies and organizations including Founder Labs, Texting.ly, and Astia.
Jenny is based in Silicon Valley.
Director, BBC Future Media
Ralph Rivera is Director of Future Media and a member of the BBC Executive Board. Reporting directly to the BBC’s Director-General, Mark Thompson, Ralph is responsible for the development of the BBC’s interactive services BBC Online and BBC Red Button.
Catering to audiences who want to access and interact with BBC programmes and services through the internet, the Future Media division brings technology and design teams together to work in partnership with the BBC’s editorial teams to create products such as BBC News Online and BBC iPlayer.
The BBC’s portfolio of websites reached 19 million licence-fee payers in February this year, making it the most popular UK-owned website on the internet while BBC Red Button continues to make interactive TV services simple and accessible, used by 14 million licence-fee payers a week, many of whom are not online.
The Future Media division works in partnership with the wider technology industry to repurpose these services for use on mobiles, gaming consoles and internet-connected TVs; in addition to the website, innovations such as BBC iPlayer can now be accessed on more than 50 different internet-connected devices.
The division also includes the BBC’s world-renowned R&D department, whose collaborative pan-industry work over the past 60 years has delivered innovations that have transformed the broadcast industry – such as colour TV, Ceefax, Nicam Stereo and Freeview HD.
An executive with extensive experience in global digital media, Ralph was appointed as BBC’s Director of Digital Media in November 2010 before being promoted to Director of Future Media in March 2011.
Ralph joined the BBC from Major League Gaming in New York, where he was responsible for product development for the largest professional video game league in the world. Prior to that, he ran AOL’s Games and Latino businesses, oversaw the expansion of AOL’s international web presence and launched the social gaming platform games.com.
Before his time at AOL, Rivera worked for publishing company Pearson Education, Simon & Schuster, Deloitte & Touche, IBM and earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia College and an M.B.A. from New York University.
Ralph is also a trustee for Children in Need.
He is married, with one daughter, and lives in London.
Serial Entrepreneur, Non-exec director, Angel Investor
Sherry Coutu is a former CEO and angel investor who now serves on the boards of companies, charities and universities. She chairs Artfinder and is a non-executive member of Cambridge University (Finance Board), Cambridge Assessment, and Cambridge University Press. She also serves on the Advisory Boards of Linkedin.com, Care.com and Tyze.com. As an angel investor, she loves working with great entrepreneurs to solve problems that matter and specialises in consumer internet, information services and education. She has made angel investments in more than 40 companies and holds investments in 2 venture capital firms. She was voted by TechCrunch as the best CEO mentor / advisor in Europe in Nov 2010. in May 2011, she was voted by Wired magazine as one the top 25 ‘most influential people in the wired world’, and one of the top ten most influential investors and women. As an entrepreneur, Sherry was founder of two businesses in the financial services industry. The first (acquired by Euromoney plc) has operations in more than 70 countries. The second, which she was CEO and chairman for was responsible for the first e-commerce transaction in the financial services industry in Oct 1995. She floated the company in 2000 (on London and Nasdaq) and was valued at more than $1 billion before being acquired (by AMP plc). Prior to this, she had executive roles with Accenture, Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte, and the LEK Partnership. Philanthropically, she helped found the Prince’s Trust Technology Leadership Group, is a member of the venture board of Cancer Research UK and serves on the Harvard Business School European Advisory Council. Sherry has an MBA from Harvard, an MSc (with distinction) from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hons with distinction) from the University of British Columbia, Canada.
General Partner, PROfounders Capital
Rogan is a founding General Partner at PROfounders Capital. Most recently Rogan Angelini-Hurll headed the Citi Pan European Media Research team, covering both UK and Continental European companies including TV and radio broadcasters, consumer, business and professional publishers, directories, advertising agencies and entertainment companies.
Prior to joining Salomon Brothers (subsequently acquired by Citi) in 1997, Rogan worked at Spectrum Strategy Consultants, originating work and managing teams of consultants on a number of projects both in Asia and Europe related to media and telecoms.
In addition, Rogan helped write the original Lastminute.com business plan with Brent Hoberman.
Head of Campus, Google
Eze Vidra is the Head of Campus, Google’s dedicated co-working, event and incubation space for startup companies in London launched in March 2012.
Prior to leading Campus, Eze was a strategic partnerships manager at Google, spearheading commerce offerings and product launches in Europe. Previously, he held leadership positions in a number of tech companies: he was Principal Product Manager of AOL Search in Europe, Senior Product Manager at Ask.com in San Francisco, Product Manager at Gerson Lehrman Group in New York and Team Leader at Shopping.com in Israel. He co-founded a technology startup in Israel in 2003 and is a passionate writer on startups and venture capital on his blog VC Cafe.
Eze holds an MBA from London Business School and a BA in Business Administration, IT Management and Entrepreneurship from the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Israel. In his spare time, Eze serves as a mentor to several European startup accelerator programs, including Seedcamp, Springboard, Emerge Labs, Oxygen and now proudly, BBC Worldwide Labs.
President, BBC Worldwide America
Herb Scannell was appointed President, BBC Worldwide America in June 2010 and is responsible for growing all business divisions and the BBC brand in the U.S. and Canada. He also sits on BBC Worldwide’s Executive Board.
Prior to joining the company, Herb was CEO of Next New Networks, a digital media company he co-founded in 2006, which was acquired by Google / YouTube. Prior to that, he was Vice Chairman of MTV Networks and President of Nickelodeon Networks and oversaw all creative and business operations for a portfolio of brands including number-one rated Nickelodeon, TV Land, Spike TV and Noggin.