Beyond Boundaries: TED x London Business School 2025 highlights

From cutting-edge innovation and reimagined leadership to personal stories of resilience and reinvention, the latest TEDxLondonBusinessSchool offers world-changing perspectives that push the boundaries of your thinking, 10 minutes at a time. 

Discover breaththrough technologies 

Describing herself as “80% human, 20% bionic”, Sarah de Lagarde, Global Head of Corporate Affairs at James Henderson, shares how AI is helping her cross biological boundaries to overcome life-changing injuries that required amputation and prosthetic technology. Her story reveals not only the can-crushing strength of her AI-assisted arm, created from components manufactured by companies in different parts of the world, but also her impressive inner strength and resilience.  

Complex global supply networks are reimagined in Tim Minshall’s vision for a more innovative, personalised and sustainable human-made world, an idea he explores in his research as Dr John C Taylor Professor of Innovation and Head of the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge. But it was a different academic setting that sparked a lightbulb moment: he gave a room of 60 schoolchildren some old computers, a set of tools, and the instruction, ‘Destroy these things!’ For the nostalgics among you, Tim’s talk also features a cameo from our old friend the Nokia 3310. 

How many unused electricals do you have in your “drawer of doom”? Research suggests it may be as many as 30 per household. Now imagine 30,000 bits of tech whizzing around the Earth, threatening to smash into a million pieces at any moment. Thankfully, Dr Andrea Antonello has good news for us about the problem of e-waste orbiting our planet. He shares how robotics company ClearSpace is, well, clearing space, and how businesses can help. 

Move from competition to collaboration 

Author and LBS graduate Deborah Chen makes the case for a more collective model of ideation, inspired by her experience of having her debut novel pirated – a million unofficial copies were in circulation. She shares how her initial responses of outrage and rebellion shifted to reflection and reimagination. Join her on the journey via Voltaire copying the Bible, Spiderman plagiarising Voltaire, and today’s LLMs repurposing just about everything ever written. 

Voltaire also pops up when Professor Sarah Hart shines a light on the often-overlooked interconnections between literature and mathematics. Exploring the ways both disciplines operate within set rules and structures, she shows how “constraints don’t hamper creativity; they can inspire it”.

Explore the invisible elements of human experience 

Intuition is often heralded as the entrepreneurial way to make decisions, but do you have the courage to question your gut feelings? And what possibilities does that make room for when you do? Dr Alex Curmi challenges ‘trust-your-gut culture’ by demonstrating how to develop intuitiveness grounded in reality. 

Two of our 2025 talks look at worker wellbeing inside and outside the office walls. LBS Assistant Professor Dr Bukky Akinsanmi Oyedeji shares the difference the look and feel of a work environment can make to staff engagement, and Professor of Work and Employment at King’s College London and Director of the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership Heejung Chung unpacks the perception of remote workers as slackers. 

What happens when ableism and sexism collide? Sharing what happened when her story of online dating as a disabled person went viral, writer Lucy Webster shares how interpersonal barriers are often just as painful as physical ones.  

Hear powerful hidden truths 

“Thanks for saying it out loud” – a YouTube comment on this next talk – sums up what TEDx is all about: ideas worth spreading. Nicolas Bermudez, an LBS MBA graduate, challenges the stereotypes around Columbia’s cocaine culture, encouraging us to look beyond the slick dialogue and meme-worthy moments of the Netflix show Narcos. 

Find insights outside of the usual format 

TEDxLondonBusinessSchool is known for hosting not just brilliant speakers but exceptional musicians. This year, singer-songwriter Milli-Rose Rubin’s haunting performance invites you to feel connected to your body, and internationally renowned sound therapists Qi-Rattan create a deeply immersive soundscape for mindfulness.  Grounding techniques can help if you have one of the world’s most common phobias: public speaking. What’s even scarier? Singing about it in front of a live audience. Over to LBS MBA student and musical comedian Danny Garg to play us out with what was once his worst fear. 

• Do you have a great idea worth spreading? Keep a look out for details of how to enter for next year’s TEDxLondonBusinessSchool